Thoughtland

On Stephen Maxwell (2): A Revolution of Rising Expectations

This is the second blog (first here) exploring the work of the late Scots nationalist intellectual Stephen Maxwell, based on his two posthumous works available on Luath Press, and originally commissioned by Bella Caledonia. This blog looks at Maxwell's critique of the default social-democracy of the SNP (coming from the left!), and concludes with some pointers towards campaigning tactics in 2014. 

Revolution of Rising Expectations

By Pat Kane, Bella Caledonia, Nov 5, 2013

Although he used language with the lapidary ease of a don, Stephen Maxwell could also coin some very useful one-liners. Take this one on nationalism’s Janus-faced approach to history: “It puts the past to work for the future”. Or, as he predictably glosses, “It translated a passive sense of ‘organic community’ into an urgent populist nationalism which mobilised popular energies in readiness for the ordeal of industrialisation under local leadership.”

One could easily take that last sentence, replace “industrialisation” with “globalisation” and “environmental crisis”, and it would neatly encapsulate the SNP’s basic (and successful) political strategy for the last decade or so. In both of Stephen Maxwell’s posthumous books, the last thing one can detect in his head or heart is an “urgent populist nationalism”.

But what other ideology than an “urgent populist nationalism” (our current version could be “Team Scotland for a prosperous, fairer nation”) is going to “mobilise popular energies” enough for a Yes vote? And bring about an independence which represents local “readiness” for the global “ordeal” of the 21st century?

Stephen’s answer to both these questions was clear, as represented in the title of his latest posthumous book: a “left-wing nationalism”. Yet that’s a clear challenge to a Scottish left which still remains fastidious about any political appeal to nationality.

Tom Nairn – as credible a figure as could be imagined, in terms of left credentials – contributes an introduction to Maxwell’s new book, which restates as neatly as possible his global take on the effectiveness of nationalism. Old-style nationalism was a creation of 18th-to-20th century industrialisation, which involved a “competitive and militarised transformation” of societies. This forced nations to over-intensify their sense of difference – to the point of “ethnicity” – as a means of shoring up their collective resources, faced with the juggernaut of modernity.

But post-Cold-War, we are facing a ramifying globalisation – a matrix of trade and communication which welcomes cultural difference, as both market opportunity and engagement strategy. Scotland’s “belated” nationalism, suggests Nairn, “may be intertwined with the novel, the onset of a new age.” What Nairn says Maxwell taught him was that “nationality can’t be glossed over or occluded. It has to be incorporated into the contemporary, forward-looking mode of sociality.”

In short: as a national community on a planet of networks, perhaps we can relax about being motivated by patriotism. Nationality becomes high-level “content” for the communication channels – which determine our prosperity as much as our manufactures or services. And the more attractive and interesting the national content, the greater the prospects.

Do we on the Scottish left – building our post-Crash model of “Common Weal” socio-economics, more productive and more participatory – think we have a “contemporary, forward-looking mode of sociality”? I’m sure we do. So are we prepared both to forge it in the context of a new Scottish nation-state, and also to proclaim it as an element of our attractive modernity, in a world of soft power and cultural diplomacy?

Should left, indy-friendly progressives be as prepared for global success – being praised for our efforts, even emulated – as much as we feel we are defensively building an ark, to weather the storms of globalisation?

Beyond Social Democracy

We need to tap into the quiet, deep-running confidence about the innovative potential of Scottish independence that Stephen Maxwell displays throughout his work. This is nowhere more evident than where he talks about what lies “beyond” social democracy, which he defines in Left-Wing Nationalism as “political liberalism, the mixed economy, the welfare state, Keynesian economics and a belief in equality”.

Of course, it would be difficult to expect such a vision to remain consistent, over nearly four decades of socio-economic development. Maxwell’s 1976 (and pre-Thatcherite) essay “Beyond Social Democracy” is to some degree a fascinating museum piece.

What a lost world – where workers’ mutuals and cooperatives, backed by state banks, operating above the level of a guaranteed income, supported by a vigorous people’s media, is the desired alternative to the “looming corporatist state”, run by a compact of trade-unions/business/government!

Yet Maxwell’s antennae quiver with great sensitivity to coming changes. That neo-liberalism was taking hold in the dying days of the Labour regime is proven by Denis Healey’s belief, reported by Stephen in the late ‘70s, that “the present range of inequalities of income, and the even greater differences in standards of living, gives an inadequate incentive to the middle class”.

We may currently fret about our insufficient safeguards on loose finance and money supply, even after a mighty systemic crash. We might also advocate for a change in Scottish company regulation that, post-Grangemouth, gives workers a strong voice in company policy.

Yet from the ‘70s, Maxwell has been making the case for an “economic decentralisation” which would make Scottish society resilient in the face of both challenges. An economy with a larger number of enterprises with much greater workers’ control might not only be good for the soul, suggests Stephen, but also increase the worker’s sense of responsibility for overall economic performance. He is worth quoting at length:

The case for employee sovereignty has recently been advocated as part of a strategy to restore to the market the central role in the allocation of resources denied it by social democratic economic management. In this strategy, democratically organised units of production would compete for markets and investment in an economy in which the expansion of the money supply would be as large as – and no larger than – the growth in productive capacity warranted. Increases in money wages would not automatically be covered by inflationary increases in the money supply as the politically expedient short-term alternative to unemployment, and workers’ control and ownership would impose a new sense of economic responsibility on the labour force.

As an alternative to the looming corporate state this picture of employee and consumer sovereignty has its attractions. But it assumes that the centralised bargaining power of the trade unions would be broken up by the spread of dispersed centres of employee control and that elected government would withstand the inevitable electoral pressures to accommodate their economic policies to premature or excessive demands for sectional increases in living standards. Both these assumptions are problematic. Whatever new economic policy options decentralisation of industrial control might uncover, it should be pursued in an independent Scotland in the first instance with the aim of limiting the growth of state power.

There’s some fulsome irony here, in a column written a few years before 1979. The words “employee and consumer sovereignty” would have a different resonance after Thatcher – meaning an assault on unions, a “share-holding democracy”, the mall-ification and credit-indebtedness of Britain. It’s also not difficult to sense Stephen’s disdain for union barons as themselves a “sectional interest” (he elsewhere makes an acute distinction between “socialism” and “Labourism”).

Yet after the meltdown of our elites, of all kinds, since 2008, it feels independence could mean returning to Maxwell’s not-travelled, or perhaps blocked-off, fork in the policy road. That is, a civil empowerment, or “social republic”, which locates real power much further down the line than the “complacent” (another favourite word) traditions of Scottish governance.

His sense of the necessary balancing-act of a future-ready politics is extremely consistent through the years. In the Donaldson Lecture at the SNP’s 2007 party conference, he sets out a thumbnail of the policy ambitions of independence. “The development of a bespoke version of social democracy, balancing a strong national framework for economic development and social welfare, with civil empowerment and the decentralisation of the management of public services is Scotland’s best hope for the future.”

The second element of the balance is as important as the first. In 1976, we read Maxwell’s warning about two of the limitations of the social democracy of his time. It has “failed to seek new forms of democratic community to moderate the rivalries of competing sectional interests”. And it has allowed “a concept of politics as a manipulative exercise, undertaken to create and maintain a compliant consensus, to smother the radical ideal of politics as a central activity in a socially responsible arid vigorously self-critical culture.”

It’s perhaps no surprise that Maxwell, who proved too unbiddable to even make it past the SNP candidates’ selection panels for the Scottish parliament, instead immersed himself in policy and advocacy for Scotland’s voluntary sector – staying with those who freely acted for others with care and engagement, not waiting for permission from “the managers of public services”. Nor is it surprising that he expresses a very early admiration (1991) for the Scottish Green Party, exerting an “influence on Scottish debate out of all proportion to its numbers.”

Getting to Yes (via Stephen Maxwell) 

I presume Stephen would have agreed with the essentially community-based strategy adopted by YesScotland to ensure a Yes vote. Engage clearly and regularly with the third of those who would consistently vote for independence under whatever economic or political weather. Invite and prepare them to become active evangelists for a Yes vote in their families, communities, playspaces and workplace. And if they can each only convert one other person, the independence majority will be solidly achieved.

Yet many questions are begged here. How many of that third could we reasonably expect to be evangelists and converters? How many of them, indeed, might regard politics in this way – as their “central activity in a socially responsible and vigorously self-critical culture”? As I have commented elsewhere  the Yes campaign(s) should see themselves as involved in the revitalisation of citizenship itself. And as many recent polls have noted, the more that people engage with the arguments, the more likely they are to vote Yes.

Yet is this citizenship drive too little, too late, and headed in the right direction? Other than their creative and artistic fraction, and a decent handful of maverick entrepreneurs, we can just about give up on the Scottish middle-classes. (Hugh Pennington’s dreadful inferiorism about the science-research funding ambitions of an independent Scotland is only the latest proof of that.) So it would seem that working-class voters – or that 70% of Scots on or below median wage – hold the key to a Yes vote.

Maxwell is ambivalent about the working-class’s potential to drive Scotland to independence. On the one hand, he criticises Tom Nairn for rendering the working class “in the role of Cinderella waiting for the kiss of a bourgeois intellectual Prince Charming to arouse its populist nationalist energies…The possibility that the Scottish working class as a component of an advanced “historic nation” might have possessed a concept of political nationalism along with sentimental nationalism seems not to have been considered.”

Yet reviewing a biography of Keir Hardie, he agrees with Hardie’s belief that “socialism was more likely to be built by an economically confident working class than by a crushed and demoralised proletariat”. And Maxwell is very alive to what he calls the “most persistent theme” of a “psychology of defensiveness” in the Scottish working-class – deeply scarred by the convulsions of war and industry since the late 19th century, and which thus came to “identify the Labour Party as its natural vehicle”.

Yet Maxwell’s injunction from his 1981 essay “Left-wing Nationalism” – the one that got him thrown out of the SNP, along with Alex Salmond – rings hugely true today. A case for independence that “concentrates on the promise of economic growth, while ignoring the divisive issue of how the fruits of growth are to be distributed, will never win the trust of the largest block of Scottish voters, the urban working class.”

So, from diving into Stephen’s forty years of writing on independence, the component parts of a winning Yes coalition would seem to be obvious.

For the SNP, who have brought us to this pass by means of their performance in government, there should be a core commitment: a relentless focus on gaining “trust” among the urban working-class in Scotland. A trust that independence implies both the defence of universal public services, and also a clear vista of economic opportunities, with some kind of targets or datelines involved.

Combined together, this will send the message that a Yes vote is a constructive, not a destructive act – an important message to send to a Scottish working-class that (as Maxwell’s work shows) have had quite enough destruction inflicted upon them.

Those previously mentioned fractions of the business and managerial class who have shaken off the coils of Scottish bourgeois turpitude should harness themselves to this purpose – that is, the shoring-up of working-class confidence in the future prosperity of an independent Scotland.

The face they should turn towards a future Scottish state is one of friendliness and constructiveness – able to cope with its social-democratic possibilities for stronger regulation between capital and labour (Jim Mather’s endorsement of Common Weal is a clear precedent – and Common Weal, as my last column suggested, could do some useful bridge-building here). The business bourgeoisie must be partners with Scottish workers, and the Scottish government, and help foment that “revolution of rising expectations” that Maxwell had so long anticipated.

For all independence supporters, but particularly non-SNP-aligned ones, whether members of other political parties or none, the focus of activity should be on community advocacy – passionate, creative, sustained, persistent advocacy. We have to be friendly, indefatigable, loving pests to those around us. Our energy and enthusiasm for independence, if it taps into the same kind of steady confidence demonstrated by Maxwell, will be contagious and inspirational.

The fluency and imagination of the “artists and creatives” that have peeled off from the Scottish bourgeoisie (mixing prole-bohemians and bourgeois-bohemians together, no doubt) should be deployed in community halls and spaces the length and breadth of Scotland. Time is short – but we surely have enough tools in the inspirational tool-box to amplify and energise the solid mobilising work that has been going on among YesScotland, National Collective, RIC, Say So Scotland, and others.

Maxwell knew how radical his own ideas were – but, as usual, he was very well armed for his critics. We should not, he counselled, “underestimate the extent to which nationalism – by publicising old ideals and proclaiming new standards, by accelerating the rate of social and economic change and by uniting different sectional groups behind a common aim – can open up new political perspectives”.

Indeed we should not. This referendum is there to be won for independence – and for that steady burn of democratic excitement which it will bring to our lives. Stephen Maxwell did not live to see it. But we will, and soon.

On Stephen Maxwell (1): The Missing Million

This is the first of two Bella Caledonia blogs (second one here), commissioned by Jamie Maxwell, son of the late nationalist intellectual Stephen Maxwell, reviewing a collection of his posthumous writings, The Case For Left-Wing Nationalism.

This book, and Maxwell's last book Arguing for Independence, have very much shaped my thinking about how to campaign for a Yes in 2014. In particular, the importance of mobilising the working-class/Labour vote, and not worried too much about the Scots middle-class (largely a lost cause). 

The Missing Million

Pat Kane, Bella Caledonia, on Nov 4, 2013

I never met (or cannot remember meeting) the late Stephen Maxwell. But I wish I had met him, or could remember him. The internet serves up no audio or video that I can find of his presence.

But the voice that comes through Arguing for Independence, and now this collection of essays The Case for Left-Wing Nationalism, conveys one of the most remarkable, penetrating and eloquent political thinkers that I have encountered in nearly 30 years in reading Scottish (or any) letters. High praise is due to his son, Jamie Maxwell, for bringing his father’s texts to the heart of the debate around independence.

Reading Left-Wing Nationalism is to be transported dizzyingly backward and forwards in Scottish history. Not just to the moment of Union, or the complex centuries thereafter, but to the last 40 years of Scottish nationalist advance. What some of us may have believed to be our most advanced formulations of Scottish progress turn out to have been quietly anticipated by Mr Maxwell.

Over these next few blogs, I want to use the new book, and to some degree the previous book, as a tool to measure our progress towards a Yes vote in the referendum. And also, to speculate a little about events after a Yes vote. (I’ve no time, or inclination, to tarry with the consequences of a No vote here.)

The Discreet Blah of the Scottish Bourgeoisie

One of Maxwell’s most important lines of critique is towards the Scottish middle class – and specifically, their failure to occupy the progressive leadership role that other bourgeoisie have historically adopted when their nations faced either crisis or opportunity. From his early review of Tom Nairn’s “The Break-up Of Britain”, he accepts the sense that the Scottish bourgeoisie have always been just off the mark of their historical moment.

We had a Reformation, a “Protestant Ethic”, without the native mercantile class that it could motivate and regulate – so Reformation became an “abstract, millennial dream…an escape from history”, rather than a seizing of it. We had a 19th century Romanticism, in Burns and Scott, but no nationalist political movement to match it, as elsewhere. So our Romanticism avoided radicalism, and curdled into Kailyardery and tartan sentimentalism.

We finally get effective political Nationalism in Scotland from the 1960s onwards. But rather than being the ideology which mobilises industrial development, and sweeps away outdated political forms, as it was in the late 19th and 20th centuries, mature Scottish nationalism faces industrial decline and branch-plantery. 

Bad historical luck? Maxwell (via Nairn) goes deeper in his critique than that. The Scottish bourgeoisie were given a privileged, conserved but “provincial” status (a favourite term of Stephen’s) by the Union deal. Professions in law, religion and education were formally protected by distinct administrative bodies. The access to imperial markets made Scots joint partners in the industrial revolution. Inside this long period, Maxwell does identify some Scottish middle class chutzpah.

He is particularly fond of a Scottish bourgeois-managerial heyday in the 1930s to 1950s, citing figures like Lord Reith (founder of the BBC), the social scientist Boyd Orr, Walter Elliot (coiner of the phrase “democratic intellect”) documentarist John Grierson and the Labour Scottish Secretary of State Tom Johnson. The last, via his great infrastructural works, left a “legacy to the Scots middle class – a belief in state-sponsored consensus and the founding of the corporatist system of Scots government”.

(History reverberates. What was the Salmond-led rally-round on Grangemouth, mediating between Ineos, the unions and the UK government to re-open the Grangemouth refinery, other than a classic Scottish corporatist exercise? Though minus the kind of controlling stake of the past – and behaving more like Philip Bobbit’s “market state”, seducing and sweetening footloose capital.)

Yet given all his deep understanding about the half-hearted and compromised character of the Scottish bourgeoisie, Maxwell still remains “astonished at the weakness of the middle class’s gut response to the dramatic change in Scotland’s potential in 1970s”.

Where were the networks of business people and administrators that could see the promise of Scotland’s oil to lift the country out of its historical doldrums? As he puts it, “In the moment of blossoming opportunity…why did they evince so little ambition for the public welfare of Scotland, or even for their own and their children’s career prospects in Scotland?” And as it turned out, 35% of AB voters voted Yes in the Assembly referendum, against 65% of DE voters.

His frustration is tangible. Throughout the pages of Left-Wing Nationalism, Maxwell is often brutally clear about the necessity of bourgeois leadership for Scottish independence. For example:

It is improbable that any distinctively working class formation will be able to act as a determining force in the affairs of a Western democracy for the foreseeable future. The live issues in the politics of the 21st century are likely to reflect middle class not working class concerns. Of course the issues themselves – the environment, the centralisation of power, cultural autonomy in an age of mass communications, relations between developing and developed states – affect working class people as much as middle class people. But the ideological formulations of these problems, the terms in which they are debated, the organisational forms they inspire, are likely to reflect middle class values and skill. If Scotland is to define and negotiate her own interest in the “post-industrial” world, the Scottish middle class will have to find a new will for public leadership.

If Maxwell’s assessment of our current century’s political agenda is right, is the Scottish middle class finding a “new will” for leading it? In terms of business, there would seem to be a growing field of green (or pink) shoots. In the ‘70s, only a few unconventional young Edinburgh financiers (no less) could raise a voice for devolution. Now, after nearly 15 years of the Scottish Parliament, we have at the very least a proper debate among the Scottish managerial bourgeoisie in Scotland, with figures like the engineering tycoon Jim McColl with his head over the parapet for indy, and organisations like Business For Scotland amassing support among small-to-medium enterprises.

Yet those who benefitted from the “historic compromise” of the Union – lawyers, teachers, preachers – are as muffled in their public response as ever. Maxwell devotes a lot of space over the years to the way that Labour’s deployment of post-war corporatism has long secured the loyalty of Scotland’s public-sector middle class. The election of two SNP governments, promising (and largely succeeding) to doughtily defend public-sector gains at Holyrood, would seem to demonstrate that loyalty is at least fluid.

Yet institutions like the STUC continue to “ca’ canny”, as does the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations in which Maxwell was such a guiding light. And the fate of the Scottish Cooperative Party’s ex-vice-chair Mary Lockhart, declaring her support for independence and losing her position, never mind the opprobrium suffered by a small group of enthusiasts daring to call themselves Labour For Independence, shows how enduringly tight the grip is between Westminsterism and Labourism in Scotland. And by implication, how that will further blunt middle class advocacy for independence.

Grimly, one notes the most recent IpsosMori poll for STV: in the least deprived areas of Scotland, it’s 22% for Yes, 69% for No; in the most deprived areas, it’s 42% Yes, 46% No. The Yes line is moving upwards for the poor – but is actually decreasing among the affluent. On the surface, it seems like, yet again, the Scottish middle classes are slowly pulling down the Venetian blinds on self-determination.

Posthumously, Maxwell’s scorn is easy to apply anew: “The Scottish working class has developed a keener sense of identity from its long record of struggle against harsh odds than the Scottish middle class has learned from its complacent enjoyment of provincial privilege… In these middle class deadlands of the imagination, history happens in other places”.

“A critical mass of concern and ambition”

Yet it may only be acts of the imagination, or the political imagination at least, that could reignite these deadlands. There does seem to be one fraction of the classic nation-progressing middle class that IS turning up for September 2014 – and that’s the artists, writers, intellectuals and now “creatives” (the catch-all for those involved directly, or tangentially, in the “creative industiries”).

Those whom one could generally define as “creative Scotland” (small-c) are, in the main, fluent and ardent supporters of a Yes vote. The mix of culture, theory, reportage and politics coursing through the pages of the Scottish blogosphere (here in Bella, but in places like National Collective, Newsnet Scotland, Better Nation and Wings Over Scotland too) would seem to bear out Maxwell’s topic list of contemporary politics.

And before anyone gets sniffy about “middle class”, Maxwell provides a very useful definition of the term: “middle class is used only to describe those members of society who make their living through utilising significant accumulated assets, whether in the form of education, training or financial capital”.

Subtract “financial capital” from that list, and you reasonably describe the power and status of “artists and creatives”. But their “significant accumulated assets” – what Bourdieu might once have called their “cultural capital” – are being deployed with a new effectiveness, in the age of social media and networks. The educated pamphleteers and publishing houses and salon organisers of the 18th and 19th century are the even-more-educated bloggers, tweeters, meet-up organisers and event-curators of the 21st.

Maxwell knew the effectiveness (or not) of these mediators well, having been a public writer, a PR supremo for the SNP and a policy advocate for the voluntary sector. Who else can be the imagineers of the “imagined community” of the nation? (Maxwell makes a tart point that the “lack of vitality” in the Scottish middle class is evidenced by their absence from contemporary Scottish literature – and the looming presence there of the working class. But looking at this present catallaxy of multi-media types, I would say there’s more than enough bourgeois vitality there, diffused through all the forms of “creative practice” currently available.)

I imagine that Stephen would have looked in a kindly way at the initiatives of a character like Robin McAlpine. At one time publicity officer of Universities Scotland and a film-maker, and now director of Jimmy Reid’s think tank The Reid Foundation, McAlpine is now relentlessly promoting (and finding much traction for) his Common Weal project.

This is a research initiative aiming to thoroughly “Nordicize” and “Germanise” debates about social, economic and institutional policy in Scotland. (Stephen, of course, was already there, producing SNP policy papers on the Nordic model in the ‘70s). But Common Weal is also a brand, aiming to concentrate a lot of post-Crash analysis and thinking (global as well as local) about a productive and flourishing society, and sear it into the quivering haunches of the independence debate.

Stephen would be pleased to see Common Weal’s central focus on raising real incomes for the majority of the population. But he would also enjoy its wide and growing periphery of policies, exploring how Scotland still has so many “inspiring organisational forms” to invent, in order to address its needs and aspirations.

Common Weal has already come under critique. A Labour-identifying-but-indy-supporting group of young activists (writing in the blog Mair Nor A Roch Wind) have accused it of displaying some of those classic corporatist consensus-building tendencies that Maxwell (and recently Gerry Hassan) both warn can stifle necessary debate in Scotland, before it properly starts.

Yet one of Maxwell’s most judicious pieces in Left-Wing Nationalism is his assessment of 1988’s Claim of Right for Scotland. He says the SNP were wrong not to join at the time: if they had, it would have given them the chance to engage with this mildly-awakening middle class. Common Weal feels like the same kind of conversion-job upon the Scottish steering classes – and looks like it might have a chance of adding up to Maxwell’s desired “critical mass of concern and ambition… a revolution in the aspirations of the Scottish middle class”. But let’s not bet the bank on it…

What is always attractive about Maxwell’s thinking is that a genuine radical appetite thrums under all of his elegant critiques. For him, the Claim of Right fell short of what he called a true “social republic” – where political rights and economic empowerment marched in step. And as for social democracy, Maxwell often invokes beyond that a “radical democracy” – a frontier of daily and communal self-government in Scottish life which could be one of the new polarities in a post-indy political culture.

Yet there is a “missing million” in Scotland, too ground-down and disillusioned to even turn up for a vote that could give them a much stronger stake in their own country. Is Maxwell’s “radical democracy” or “social republic” the thing to get that Yes vote out?

Or is a promise of “high-wage, high-skill” jobs a more concrete offer, and more likely to appeal to the 60% of Scotland only on median wage? Or to that 20% of Scots who seem to permanently endure living on or below the poverty line in Scotland, from Stephen’s days in the late ‘70s to the present?

I will explore the strengths and limitations of Stephen Maxwell’s desired “Scottish model” in the next blog.

Building “Radical Scotland”: An Interview with Pat Kane

One of the most energetic and original independence campaign organisations to arise is the Radical Independence Campaign, who are organised by the International Socialist Group. I did an interview with one of their members, in the run up to their wildly successful conference this year. Very much sums up my position going forward into this final 8 months of campaigning. 

Building “Radical Scotland”: An Interview with Pat Kane

By Kezia Kinder (International Socialist Group)

Published 3rd November, 2013 (ISG website version here) 

Pat Kane has been active on the Scottish left for thirty years. Within that time he has been a lead singer, journalist, campaigner, rector, radio presenter, author and academic. Now, Pat is on the advisory board for Yes Scotland as we enter the final year until the referendum. I asked Pat about his thoughts on the referendum so far, his hopes for the Scottish left in the future and how his ideas and Scotland’s ideas have changed over the past three decades.

As an advocate of Scottish independence we begin by asking whether he thinks we’ll win next year’s referendum:

Yes, I do. I think the essential case for independence – not just in terms of Scotland’s viability, but in terms of the principle of completing the powers of the Scottish Parliament – is inarguable.”

What do you think of the independence debate so far? While there have been some moments of inspiration, it’s not how you imagined it, is it!?

No, actually, it is quite as I imagined it!

I don’t think Scotland is like Catalonia – we aren’t facing an implacable foe, tainted with dictatorship, who denigrates our language and culture. We are a very well-developed, English-speaking nation that can lay claim to being one of the birthplaces of modernity itself, through the Scottish Enlightenment. So I always thought that the debate would be factual, steady, discursive. The passion will build on the basis of a dour Scots rationality working its way through to a settled conclusion.”

The debate so far has been very much dominated on the pro-independence side by Alex Salmond and the SNP. So are alternative, more radical voices beginning to permeate through to the public at large?

I thought the recent Panelbase/Wings Over Scotland poll was completely fascinating on this. They identified that don’t-know voters are a bit more lefty, green-supporting and republican than the average Scot. But some of the other “social” questions were a combination of comforting and alarming – majorities for a council tax freeze, EU membership, a written Constitution, and a publicly owned rail system: and majorities against Trident, bedroom tax, fracking, and Page 3. But also majorities for NATO membership, retention of monarchy, harsher workfare, the death penalty, nuclear power stations – and majorities against minimum alcohol pricing, votes for prisoners, and a compelled 50/50 gender balance for MSPs.

I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen Maxwell’s writing in the last few weeks – and he counsels that “left-wing types should be patient”, in terms of the existing support for the kind of “radical democracy” (as opposed to social democracy) he asks for. The historical legacy of Scotland in the Union – a querulous middle-class compromised and unable to lead in a progressive direction, a self-defensive working class battered by war, industrialisation and de-industrialisation – means that we have to fan the flames of radicalism in Scotland carefully and sustainably.

The SNP are an alliance of interests across the ideological spectrum, always have been, always will be – but the necessary fact for the left in Scotland is that they, and not an alliance of pro-indy parties (which would have been my desired option), are the ones in the electoral position to bring about independence. I think they have to wisdom to know that they are the midwives to a new Scotland, and that they will – and should not – own the entire result. That’s why entities like Yes Scotland, RIC [the Radical Independence Campaign] and Common Weal are so important. They articulate the basic principle of full powers, and raising ambitions for what we could do with them, in a non/all-party space – which, in all good faith, we cannot expect a political party like the SNP to do effectively on its own. It might be a temporary alliance between the SNP and the left in Scotland, to bring about a Yes vote – but what it will enable is a permanent change in the life of this country.”

The Radical Independence Conference will take place on 23rd of this month – what are your hopes for the conference and will you be there?

I’m afraid I am out touring with Hue And Cry throughout England at that point, so I can’t be there. My hope is that people talk to each other, find strength and optimism in each other, and that there are more events where we sit down and work through the detail of better institutions, legislations and practices that we can campaign for in an independent Scotland. You should give yourself the realistically-utopian chance to imagine the first 5-10 years of an independent Scotland very concretely.”

You’ve mentioned on twitter your hopes for a new party post-referendum of ‘social democrats and democratic socialists’. Can you elaborate on this for us?

As the 80′s magazine used to say, I think there is a “Radical Scotland” that should begin to look at itself – across left-greens in the existing parties (SNP, Labour, Green, SSP, maybe even some Lib-Dems), the labour movement, voluntary groups, NGOs, environmentalists, etc. – and ask whether there is a clear and common platform, to the left of where an SNP election manifesto might be for the first Holyrood elections under indy in 2016, that it could campaign on. Similar to the Front De Gauche in France at the last election.

The Reid Foundation’s Common Weal project might be the policy basis of that. But I think, when we get a Yes vote, there will be a lot of bewildered Unionist party members – particularly in the Labour party/movement – who will find it cognitively dissonant to stay within their party structures, so virulently will they have argued against the new reality. I think they need to be provided with a home. This might also apply to those within the SNP who didn’t vote for NATO membership, and who might see it as incredibly important to raise a voice for neutrality or distance from that Alliance, now that independence is a reality.”

So, what are your hopes for the Scottish Left in the future, and do you think there are differences between the Scottish Left and the English or “British” Left?

As above, I think we need to be ready for some fundamental realignments post-indy. I think the first target for the Scottish Left under indy is to form themselves as a decisive bloc of seats in the Scottish Parliament of 2016. Common Weal may well be capacious enough for people to sign up to even from their existing party affiliations – let’s see. But I think it is very important for those Maxwellian “social democrats and democratic socialists” to give themselves the chance to make their voices clearly heard, for the first time, in a Scottish political context worthy of their idealism and energy.

I think there will always be a “Left of these Islands” – I am myself a member of Compass, the Labour-aligned but pluralist group based in London, whose policy agenda I very much agree with, in a Scottish context or not. But I do think Scottish independence is the radical act required not just to forge a better society in Scotland, but to be the shock event that compels fundamental changes on the centre-left in England. An indy Scotland could allow Miliband, for example, to go into the 2015 General Election arguing that Trident should be cancelled (as the UK could not afford the costs of relocation), in alliance with the Lib-Dems on a properly proportional electoral system for rUK, perhaps proposing a new, post-Lords Second Chamber (founded on regional representation) located in the North of England. I’m not that hopeful… but I do believe Scotland should lead by example.

You’ve written a lot on culture – how do you feel working class culture is different to that of the middle class? And how should we get a left-wing message across to working class people in a way that relates directly to them?

Stephen Maxwell in his new book The Case For Left-Wing Nationalism has a very useful definition of middle class: “The term middle class is used only to describe those members of society who make their living through utilising significant accumulated assets, whether in the form of education, training or financial capital”. The point being that we have to spread out the possibility of “accumulating significant assets” throughout the entire Scottish population. In that sense the only difference between working-class and middle-class in Scotland is an asymmetry of resources and power. Again I think Common Weal is right on the mark when it points out just how poorly remunerated most Scots are in their work – 70% of the country on median income. We need a combination of a targeted industrial and service planning strategy, growing certain areas of the economy – sustainable energy/engineering and retrofitted infrastructure, food, drink and tourism, care and health, small high-skill businesses and cooperatives of all kinds – that will provide high-skill and high-paid jobs to the majority. We need to say to working-class Scots that independence allows us to make clear choices, to shift national resources towards the majority rather than the minority – and to keep pointing to our European and Nordic neighbours as proof that it can be done, without old-style nervousness about “tax rises” short-circuiting people’s attention spans.

Working in journalism and the media, Pat began to explore the idea of the “Play Ethic”, writing a book on the subject published in 2006. We asked him to explain the concept of the Play Ethic a little more…

Max Weber once wrote about “The Protestant (Work) Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” – ie, the set of attitudes about duty, routine, self-discipline, and commitment to labour (whatever the job) that kept capitalism going. I would rewrite that now as “The Play Ethic and the Spirit of Informationalism” – ie, the centrality of creativity, inventiveness, passion and optimism to the information-and-service driven economies of today. The work ethic had its radical potential: the “dignity” of labour demanded its due in terms of better working conditions, and more welfare to sustain a working life. But I think the play ethic also has its radical potential. True “creativity” cannot be commanded or compelled – you have to let people have genuine zones of autonomy and secured freedom in their lives, for great ideas to naturally come through. So the politics of the play ethic is very much into shorter working weeks, guaranteed social incomes, fabulous public facilities – the collectively-constructive “ground of play” that will allow human creativity to flourish.

We need as much ingenuity for our challenges going ahead as we can generate. In terms of Scotland, I think we come at this through education – we’ve just launched a brilliant Play Strategy, and the Curriculum for Excellence is pointing towards letting both pupils and teachers co-create their learning, rather than have their lives testing out of them. My campaign with the Play Ethic has been to get adults to realise they have to build grown-up institutions with zones of creativity in them, not just keep it for the best schooling.”

You’ve been politically active in Scotland for thirty years – how do you think Scotland’s political identity has changed over that time, and how have your own political ideas changed with it?

Yeah, thanks for reminding me Kezia, thirty years…

I think the essential shift has been a growing confidence about Scottish identity, a growing sense of the acute limitations of being governed purely from Westminster, and a period where we saw that even limited powers of self-government allowed us to do progressive stuff, as well as the basic stuff. I don’t think one can underestimate how insecure Scots have been about their own capacities and status for so many decades, even centuries. I am a green-left guy, and I have high ideals for an independent Scotland. But I think the basic achievement of independence will be to make Scots feel like full citizens of their polity, for the first time ever – willing and able to take full responsibility for the shaping of the nation they have decided to live, love, create and work in. I think that final step forwards (and upwards) will have massive psychological consequences for Scotland. We are a lucky country in terms of human and natural resources – but that could just be the platform for real leadership in the world, towards justice and equality. That was my dream for Scotland 30 years ago – and it’s the same one today.