By Pat Kane. First published on JUNE 1ST, 2019
NOSTALGIA is a feeling that lingers inside you, like a cloud of smoke you can’t dispel. It’s an interesting question to ask yourself: what do you feel nostalgic about?
Spontaneously, my own response is: radical bookshops. As a GlasgowUniversity student in the 80s, I used to drift between about six of them, studding the town centre and the West End.
By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 23RD, 2019
THE word of the week is “independent”. From what, and to do what, exactly?
Those appalling Yessers among us (you know who you are) have already fanned out in satirical force. They are wondering, idly, whether at any point soon The Independent Group – the renegade squad of awfully sensible Labour and Tory MPs which launched this week – will even recognise that Scotland exists. Never mind the possibility of an “independent” Scotland. (Does that mean we’re a group too?) As for abuse, so far we’ve had The Funny Tinge Group Limited (this references both the racist solecisms of Angela Smith, as well as the weird company legal status of the group itself). I also saw “UKIG” (ho ho, excellent). Not to mention, if they ever manage to get some of their more beige Caledonians to turn, the Scottish Independent Party (anti-independence, of course).
By Pat Kane. First published on FEBRUARY 9TH, 2019
‘I’VE been wondering what that special place in hell looks like, for those who promoted Brexit, without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.” Thus did the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, wring some extra harrumphing (is that even possible?) from the Brexitannia Chorus the other day.
But I detect a jolt of extra outrage, coming from the specific imagery that Tusk deployed. Coincidentally, as the news flashed everywhere, I was listening to the excellent Talking Politics podcast from the London Review of Books.
By Pat Kane. First published on JANUARY 26TH, 2019
WE mourned a quiet and substantial Scot earlier this week. It’s fair to say there was an outpouring of tributes for the late Andrew Fairlie – the two-Michelin-starred superchef at the Gleneagles Hotel, and my former fellow board member on Yes Scotland.
Andrew was a poignant package. A working-class boy who detected tarragon in the sauce of the hotel restaurant where he was skivvying. This sent him on a spectacular journey though the great kitchens of the world, particularly in London and Paris. In a world where taste – of all kinds – is notoriously subjective, and where the power relations between people can often be the most oppressive and instrumental, Andrew had quite the anchor: his memories of dinner-table debates about the future of Scotland, with his father, the notable SNP grandee Jim Fairlie.
By Pat Kane. First published on NOVEMBER 17TH, 2018
I HAD to check a few times on Netflix, but yes it’s there. In its opening credits, David Mackenzie’s fascinating film about the degradation and redemption of Robert the Bruce spells its title precisely this way: Outlaw/King.
To my mind, that slash (and yes, there are many other forms of slashing in this gorefest) makes intellectually explicit what is the movie’s implicit theme.
If you are a national community residing within a bigger polity, to what extent should its leaders seek progress (or even maintenance) within the rules – or by challenging the rules themselves? Are you king or Outlaw? Or does that slash indicate how one stance might modulate back and forth with the other, according to circumstances?
By Pat Kane. First published on OCTOBER 14TH, 2017
GEORGE Monbiot’s new book, Out of The Wreckage: A New Politics For An Age of Crisis, should be of great interest to anyone with political ambitions to change their country – whatever country that is.
His core idea is that human beings crave powerful stories to make sense of their lives. No matter the facts they corral, any effective politics must have such a story. Monbiot says the most shaping ones are “restoration” tales – heroes coming to repair the collective damage left by identifiable villains.
By Pat Kane. First published on SEPTEMBER 2ND, 2017
THE stage-setters in the ScotGov events team should award themselves an extra Tunnock’s teacake at the end of this week.
Nicola Sturgeon’s speech on the Scottish economy took place at a Prestwick factory that used to build Spitfires, and now houses a high-end aircraft components manufacturer … called “Spirit”, no less.
By Pat Kane. First published on AUGUST 26TH, 2017
SO we just had our GERSday – the date when the report on the yawning deficits in the Scottish national budget (known as GERS) is delivered. Debt, doom, disaster. However, I would say the indy movement was much more ready for it than usual.
There has been good rebuttal, indeed pre-buttal – which Business For Scotland did last week with early questions over the UK’s poor recent collection of North Sea oil revenues, compared with Norway.
By Pat Kane. First published on JUNE 10TH, 2017
STRANGE “defeat”, when this number of SNP seats would once have passed Margaret Thatcher’s rule — that a majority of representatives for independence in Scotland guarantees a new nation-state. But the rules have changed since — and to be fair, in its pursuit of a legal indy referendum in 2014, the SNP played its part in changing them.
But if this is instead a “victory”, it’s a gey strange one. One that includes both Alex Salmond and Angus Robertson, the vital past and the leading present of Scottish Nationalist politics, being removed from their seats by an overt and covert coordination of cross-party Unionist campaigning.
By Pat Kane. First published on APRIL 29TH, 2017
GLASGOW belongs to who? Well, let’s see. Opinion polls for the June Westminster General Election show the SNP taking something of a hit across Scotland. But the rumour mill on May’s local council elections says that it’s going to be a landslide in Glasgow for the Nationalists, tipping 50 per cent of the overall vote.
The Yes City looks like it’s finally about to have its Yes “City Government”, as the party’s shadow council leader Susan Aitken likes to phrase it. She continues, “I will make Glasgow a rival to Barcelona, Copenhagen and Berlin”. These are bold claims, and one can already have fun with them by highlighting the quirkiness of these places.
Will the “city government” be removing busts and statues of old imperial masters, or putting an overall ceiling on hotel rooms to curb disruptive levels of tourism, as Barcelona’s radical mayor Ada Colau has done?
By Pat Kane. First published on MARCH 18TH, 2017
AND yet we realised:
Hatred, even of meanness Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice Makes the voice hoarse.
O, We who wanted to prepare
The ground for friendship Could not ourselves be friendly.
– Bertolt Brecht, To Those Born Later”
THESE lines have been running through my head, since the First Minister gravely announced her timetable for a second independence referendum. How can this binary, fundamental, what-kind-of-society-are-we choice become a “friendly” process, this time round?
By Pat Kane. First published on MARCH 4TH, 2017
IT’S not often you get the chance to be involved in the launch of a new political force. But I took it this week, as one of the co-initiators of The Alternative UK (www.thealternative.org.uk), inspired by and connected to Denmark’s Alternativet party, which describes itself as being for “sustainability and entrepreneurship”.
Our soft launch in London was full of the diversity, energy and global embrace which that world city can provide, and which always makes this Scot welcome. (It also shows what a bum steer Mayor Khan was given by his Scottish comrades recently).
By Pat Kane. First published on DECEMBER 3RD, 2016
‘The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” That’s what the thuggish Dick proposes in Shakespeare’s Henry VI as a means of improving society. And perhaps one way to hasten their end is the sight of lawyers making a killing.
This week in Scotland has provided quite a spectacle of all that. The new Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, Gordon Jackson QC, suggested that independence might allow Scots lawyers to “grab some of that [legal] practice cake” from London, which usually secures the major litigations.
This is a snap blog I wrote for Prospect magazine (online version) about the SNP's massive result in the 2015 General Election, on May 8th, 2015
Sturgeon and the SNP will celebrate today—but the toughest work is ahead.
Pat Kane, Prospect magazine
So was the Tory majority procured through Project Fear II? Just a few bleary hours after the result, that would seem to be the case.
The first Project Fear was the winning strategy in the independence referendum for the No side—a well-drilled, cross-party orchestration between the press and the Coalition government, to blare the klaxons about the systemic instability that a Yes vote would bring.
With a cruel irony, the Conservatives have applied the same scaremongering strategy to their erstwhile No-voting partners in Better Together, the Labour Party—all those primal screens showing Miliband popping out of the pocket, or dancing to the strings, of either Salmond or Sturgeon.
What partly explains the frankly stunning discrepancy between the polling organisations predicting a dead heat, and the final result delivering a slender Tory majority, isn’t just the shy rUK voter, but the tactical rUK voter—previously a Scottish phenomenon (well, they’ve moved on to a different reality altogether.)
And those tactical votes were surely partly driven from a drumbeat of “chaos” and “instability”—and perhaps also combined with a genuine ideological disagreement, among middle-Englanders, with the left-of-centre policy amalgam that a Labour-SNP arrangement would represent.
Is there a genuine note of disappointment from Sturgeon and her team that the SNP isn’t now able to contribute to a majority swirl of progressive forces in Westminster? I think so.
That’s partly because Sturgeon knows this truth: that the gradual build of confidence-and-competence in Scottish government among Scots would have been the most solid route to a robust majority in a second independence referendum. (That positive spirit is what’s powered the Yes voters to keep their movement going, by means of the SNP—or the “YeSNP,” as I call them now).
Independence would have happened best under conditions of optimism, progress and uplift; now it’ll be a harder, grittier route, grimly fighting the sturm-und-drang of a regnant Tory party. But that’s the path that lies before Sturgeon and the SNP—and you might imagine the deep strategising that’s going on in their Edinburgh New Town bunkers right now.
What impact will these 56 SNP members have in Westminster, now that the progressive majority can’t be assembled? Of course they will be automatically enrolled into committees, get their chance at PMQs, benefit from massively increased supports funds—which will doubtless assist with the much needed policy formation for a better, more worldly independence offer.
And we might see a neat turn in the “legitimacy” meme, which is that the scale of the SNP win compels Cameron to make an offer on enhanced devolution much closer to what is now a massive consensus of Scottish opinion.
The Prime Minister’s opening One-Nation speeches throughout Friday would seem to suggest they’ll make some commensurate response. Though there’s weasel-wording in his idea of Scotland as “the most powerful devolved parliament in the world”—which could be far from a coherent federal solution that separates powers, institutes electoral reform, defines the purpose (and location) of a new second chamber, and a’ that.
And the Tories, being the Tories, still have the opportunity to blow it. They could impose some kind of non-gradual, brutal fiscal autonomy that effectively (and ostentatiously) reduces the overall Scots budget, placating the resentments of middle-English voters they so effectively stoked up during the General Election.
So as the Scots Bloc shakes its fist at a spectacle of continued Tory austerity, a renewed Trident (by both Conservative and Labour parties), the miserable shitstorm of European referendum debate, its other hand will be arranging pieces on a chess board, trying to line up a checkmate for the Union.
No Indyref 2 on the SNP manifesto for the 2016 Holyrood elections, I would predict: wrath must be nursed, over a few useful years, to keep it warm. But it’s now very, very likely for the 2020 Scottish Parliament manifestos (and I mean plural—the Greens, and perhaps some new post-Scottish-Labour left grouping, may join the Nats in so proposing).
This will be a bumpier, grumpier road than the Abraham-Maslow-like flourishing towards full self-government that the “progressive” scenario promised. But the last stop of independence is now not so far off as it felt on September 19th, 2014. And it is as hard and clear as a spring day in Govan, Gordon or Greenock.
This is my second pre-General-Election essay for The National, published May 6th, 2015 (the first is here). Again, after the event, it's a little painful to read my optimism for a prog majority in Westminster... but never mind Borgen, who could have predicted Corbyn?
A dollop of Borgen, a pinch of House of Cards ... and a chance to mould a new model for society
Pat Kane for The National
SO tomorrow – unless commercial polling is about to lose all credibility – Scotland looks like it’s going to shake up the place. Or at least, install its strong interests (and principles) right at the heart of the British State.
As a spectacle of power live from London, this will be a continuously fascinating drama for us all, a real-life blend of Borgen and House of Cards. A new crowd of street campaigners, svelte professionals and outright characters will be finding their way around those encrusted corridors.
If the predictions are right, their sheer numbers will compel not just the media, but the mechanics of Westminster government itself to change. I imagine Scottish political journalists are both delighted at the increased job security, and daunted by the coming avalanche of new stories to be covered.
Now that the energy and activism of the indyref seems to have achieved some kind of concrete result, let’s start thinking about the next set of horizons for Scottish progress.
The Scots Bloc will help bring the rest of the UK (in reality, mostly England) inside the European social-democratic mainstream. But what big challenges lie beyond the Borgenisation of everything? And how might a confident, coherent Scotland respond, and perhaps lead?
In my futures work for the innovation charity Nesta, a few grand themes about what we face on the way to the mid-century keep emerging. One is automation, and by implication employment and labour. According to a range of predictions, around 45 per cent of existing jobs in the developed world will disappear in 20 years, due to self-driving cars, workerless factories, and data-crunching smart computers replacing white-collar routine.
Who will this shift benefit? Well, look at who the past 20 years of digitalisation have benefitted: tech and net giants such as Apple and Google, amassing gargantuan profits while low-to-middle incomes have stagnated or even fallen.
Our centre-left politicians might agree on the need for “high-skill, high-wage” economies – addressing “deficits” or welfare bills through unspecified “growth”. But left to purely capitalist devices, the prospect of automation will bring an even more economically polarised society than we have now.
The only “growth” will be in the fortunes of those few who own, and those slightly more numerous who manage, these automated systems and platforms. The consequent societal damage should be obvious. That is, unless some nations and polities can strongly assert the social and human factors in this scenario.
This is not a Luddite response – or at least, not as the Luddites are usually misrepresented. They were for technology that might, as their writings put it, “benefit the commonality”. And if there’s one achievement of Scotland over the past few decades, it is a rich sense of national “commonality” (or common weal).
So what would a Scots response to the age of automation be – with, say, the tools of welfare and taxation at our disposal? One suggestion would be to expand the notion of the social wage, announced by Salmond in his prospectus after the last SNP electoral landslide in 2011.
The social wage was a concept covering the support that the Scottish Government would give – eg, free tuition fees, prescriptions, and personal care – to establish an agreed collective social floor, from which individual Scots might rise and flourish.
How might we strengthen that floor, given the prospect of millions of low-to-middling jobs and wages disappearing over the next few years?
Natalie Bennett, the head of the UK Green Party, suffered badly at the beginning of the campaign, unable to provide costings for her party’s flagship policy of a citizen’s (or guaranteed) income. But it’s the underlying justification of a citizen’s income that needs to come out.
EVEN in terms of global leadership, one nation must start to advocate that the productivity benefits of automation have to be distributed among the “commonality”. Now, similar to a wealth tax, no nation would want to lead on introducing a citizen’s income, given the mobility of capital and business.
But Scottish politicians should be in the forefront of arguments that the EU should consider a social wage or citizen’s income as a response to the coming wipe-out of employment sectors. And we can, at a regional or municipal level, start to experiment with some of these models.
The other massive trend bearing down upon all societies is the consequence of reducing carbon emissions, in order to prevent exponential warming of the planet.
Technological innovation leading to greater efficiencies – like Elon Musk’s household battery, just announced – will partly address this. But the need to move away from a high-consumption-driven economy, and to reduce the material throughput of resources in our system, is more urgent than any technical fix.
After the splurge and excess of 30 years of glittering though wasteful neo-liberalism, what kind of society would it take to resist the lure of the high-street or mega-mall chain stores?
Maybe one that has found other sources of meaning, beauty, relationship and pleasure than consumer lifestyles? And perhaps found those in increased political awareness, an ethos of social care, an intrinsic interest in education and skills, a vibrant, participatory culture?
Is Scotland that place? Mibbes aye. Yes, we need to have a macro-level argument about the oil we leave in the ground, or don’t burn off for energy. But we Scots also have human and creative resources for one of the most important collective journeys we’ll make in the next 30 years. How can we think of policy that develops and increases those resources?
So we’re voting this time to reform Britain, essentially. But Scottish independence is still the best context in which we can fully imagine, and realise, Scottish progress and development. And by virtue of the standards we set in pursuit of that goal, we help progress and development across these islands, and further beyond.
For better or worse, for richer or poorer, Scotland is now a “laboratory for democracy”, to borrow the words of the US Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis. We should be proud of that, and the inspiration it brings to many, as we make our way – thoughtfully, as ever – to the ballot boxes tomorrow.
My early 2015, mid-general-election piece for Bella Caledonia, 5th Feb, 2015
Some Notes Against Complacency
By Pat Kane
In the midst of my own lunchtime cartwheels over the recent Ashcroft polls yesterday – showing Scottish Labour’s potential evaporation, constituency by constituency, by the SNPs rayguns – I received a few sharp throbs of pain from some ugly old Yesser scar-tissue. You’ve been here before, pal, came the message, in distinct morse-code-like pulses.
In response, let me batter out some Notes Against Complacency.
Note 1: You’re not the SNP – you’re the YeSNP – so act accordingly. I’ve already had pelters for minting the phrase “YeSNP”, but I’m going to stick to it grimly for now. “ScotsBloc” might work if there was more than one party in the coming General Election stramash – there’s not. But what does exist is a party swollen by the consequences of the non-partisan, culturally-conscious, community-led activism of the Yes movement. It’s also resulted in a brace of parliamentary candidates, some great pals of mine, who came to the fore in that movement, and who – I hope – will be men and women o’ independent (as well as Indy) minds.
The SNP leadership and its circles must remember that it lost a referendum on a prospectus mostly brewed up in an elite bunker. That bunker explicitly fashioned it as a play-safe strategy, whose keystone – the currency union – was as easily refuted by an implacable British state as Jim Sillars predicted it would be.
The recent appeal for manifesto ideas from the wider membership is a good move. But a wise course would be to keep remembering, more than ever, that it’s the turbulent energies of a diverse movement – and a movement well to the left of the Salmond era – that’s gotten them to this powerful, unexpected post-No position. I’m still calling them the YeSNP. So there.
Note 2: The YeSNP must keep engaging in a “Battle for Britain”. If the aim is to turn this early polling promise into actual SNP (oh, alright, I’ll release you for a moment) seats on the day of the General Election, the UK implications of their policy and ideological positions must be explored and extended. It’s started with the agreed “red lines” positions with Plaid and the Greens (and extended by Common Weal a few days ago).
In the coming debates, I don’t think we should underestimate just how brilliant it will look to see four blustering blokes being elegantly unravelled by three smart power-feminists I’m sure Natalie Bennett will get her act together for the event).
But the SNP should keep searching for allies in the rest of the island, particularly among a) the English non-Blairite labour-movement centre-left, and b) the plethora of English activist networks (like People’s Assembly, 38 Degrees, the anti-war and environmental movements, the gathering Northern regional pressure groups).
Look at the diversity of activists that Compass (used-to-be Labour left pressure group, now an “open tribe”) has brought together for its Change: How? conference kicking off this coming Sunday in London. Apart from the actual presence of Scots-indy figures, what does this mix of arts, workshops, performance, idealists remind you off? Yes, it’s a “National Collective” event in all but name.
The democratic carnival of the indyref has recalled the English left to its interest in the culture of politics – all that 80s and 90s invocation of Gramsci, and latterly Stuart Hall, that unfortunately got translated by New Labour into marketing strategies and Cool Britannia. Scots self-determinists have understood well for the last few decades that pluralism, and the right to self-expression, builds deep political muscles, rather than being “off-message”. We should embrace that the English left are remembering this.
The “anti-austerity” and “more powers” elements of the SNP/Plaid/Green alliance are deeply attractive to these constituencies. Also keep an eye out for a revival in popular anti-Trident sentiment down south as well, enabled by new network tools and with major-name endorsement.
To see and hear the SNP ally itself to these progressive English forces – stationed well to the left of Miliband’s Labour Party – will maintain credibility with those Scottish Labour voters who are actively considering “lending” their vote to the SNP in May. The SNP leadership should be alive to the ways that cultivating these rUK groups can give it a chance of a different story coming through the London-based mainstream media. This will impact on those Scottish voters who are more passive in their media consumption (ie, not the “cybernats” of legend). And on that point…
Note 3: The UK media-establishment complex will play hardball again.So keep consuming and supporting alternative media (including The National). It’s quite a realisation – and on a bad day, a somewhat chilling one – to find that you have entirely lost faith that the BBC’s UK news operation can ever fairly represent the politics of Scottish self-determination.
I’m sure many of you experienced the same shiver of cynical understanding the other day. Were the Ashcroft polls on the ScotLab collapse more like a warning klaxon than a snapshot of opinion – something fired up from one part of the media-establishment complex to awaken the rest? Doesn’t it actually herald the return of the blitzkrieg of lying, loathing and demonisation that we came to call “Project Fear” – and which, as it turned out, actually did do enough to intimidate enough Scots to keep Yes from victory?
Well, if it does, then we are at least as well prepared as we were, if not a lot better. One of the salient factors in Syriza’s victory in Greece was not just its use of social media, but its access to, and support from, both a national radio station and a national newspaper for years beforehand.
We know that Scots voters who were more passive and less interactive in their media consumption – older, more traditional voters – correlated more with a No voting profile. So it is incredibly important that YeSNP (it’s back again!) types and others economically support The National paper in these next few months (and its ideological sister, the Sunday Herald). The National will become, effectively, campaign literature that can be easily obtained at the street corner, and passed to friends who occupy this bracket.
Let me be clear – this makes no request for either paper to change its existing editorial policy. The National needs only be as committed to its desired, front-page outcome – “an independent Scotland” – as the Record is to its “Vow”, “Vow Plus”, or whatever variation of Labour Unionism it traditionally supports.
Yet I don’t want to downgrade that we’ve managed to build, and maintain, an alternative public media sphere in Scotland after the referendum, out of zeros and ones (and the steady commitment of writers and readers). Newsnet.scot has come about as a fusion of the old Newsnet Scotland site, and Derek Bateman’s passionate podcasting and blogging. Bella Caledonia maintains its preeminence as the home of progressive Scottish thinking and writing; Wings Over Scotland continues its necessary and meticulous media monitoring, “watch the watchmen”.
And commonspace.scot a project of Common Weal – is picking up speed as a vital aggregator of progressive-left Scottish (and global) content from across the Net, including these sites and many other independent bloggers. When any of them make their appeals for cash, as they doubtless will in the next few months, respond as well as you can. You literally pump oxygen into the largely airless abyss of mainstream Unionist media in Scotland.
And, at least until May, we do seem to have squeezed two regular, nightly political programmes out of the budgets of STV and BBC (though for how long, who knows). Merely from necessity, these shows have an appetite for new guests and voices, which figures from the indy media sphere in Scotland often provide. We should regard them as targets for intervention with interesting stories, angles and events.
Note 4: Stay awake. Keep talking. Do what you can. Whatever’s happening, and whatever the outcome, it’s better to be busy being born than busy dying in the post-referendum Scotland. And it’s a lot better than I expected it would be. That’s definitely worth a little throbbing scar tissue.
This is the unedited version of my column for Scotland on Sunday (here's printed copy). There are a few crucial paragraphs reinstated here which give the piece more balance - please take this post as definitive. It was also a great opportunity to announce my appointment to the advisory board of YesScotland - very excited and proud. As usual, all comments very welcome.
Pat Kane: A ‘Yes’ vote is not just for independence, it can let us find our own direction
Scotland on Sunday, 8 July 2012
“It’s not just about taking Scotland’s side, it’s about taking sides in Scotland”. Jim Sillars’ axiom has been rattling round my head a lot, in these opening weeks of the referendum campaign.
For those independistas who still can’t quite believe they have a clear run at the big prize while in their prime (waves hand furiously), there is an understandable hesitation about exactly how to go forward. And in order to make an authentic, resonant case for ‘Yes’, both parts of Jim’s wise words have to be reckoned with.
Natural and satisfying, of course, simply to take Scotland’s side. Indeed, Scottish politics has been running off the fumes of a consensus patriotism since the referendum that instituted the Scottish Parliament in 1999.
We might deride Jack McConnell’s “best wee country in the world” slogan (those billboards at Glasgow Airport were replaced, let us recall, by paens to RBS). But we have an SNP administration which is no less unrepentantly boosterist about this wee country than the man in the dull grey kilt.
In his circuits through China, the Middle-East, Northern Europe and recently California, Alex Salmond trails clouds of glorious joint-projects in his wake, simulating a Scottish economic diplomacy that already has its feet under the top international tables in Brussels and New York.
From playing the straight man with Craig Ferguson and Brave’s Merida, to swapping sustainability tips and tools with the oligarchs of Qatar and China (and the social-democrats of Scandinavia), the Salmond brand is partly about quelling the Scottish cringe. The First Minister and his Cabinet are modelling what it would look like to act with confidence and competence on a world stage. Even Kenny Macaskill’s Megrahi ruling, however controversial, was partly about reinforcing Scots law’s global status.
Taking Scotland’s side in this way - that is, prosecuting “the Scottish interest” at the highest available levels - is intended to make voters feel more secure about a clear vote for statehood. An independent Scotland is not a shivering youth stepping out into a demanding adult world, but already one of the grown-ups in the room of geopolitics.
But it’s possible to be, as it were, too “grown-up” - so transfixed by the “credibility” questions around Scottish independence that, at least around the edges, you begin to lose the radical and transformative point of the whole exercise. Then it’s becomes difficult not to start taking sides in Scotland.
Salmond and Murdoch, for example. The least of our concerns should be the question of a “quid pro quo” between Salmond’s support for the BSkyB takeover, and the Sun’s turnaround in support for the SNP.
I’ve no doubt that, in the chambers of the FM’s mind, he felt perfectly able to divide and rule his interests: a Scottish “jobs jobs jobs” justification for privately lobbying for the bid on one side; the need to get some independence propaganda into the heart of a traditionally Unionist commercial press on the other.
But down the middle is the kind of policy gap that we’ll have to raise a stramash about in the next 2 years, if independence is to be anything more than an abstract aspiration to self-determination. For example, is any measure that justifies “jobs jobs jobs” in Scotland to be uncritically accepted? All jobs in the military-industrial sector, to any customer on the planet? Will there be a tension between a Government that commits to a “living wage” for all employees, and a Scandinavian-style welfare system - but which also holds out a full repertoire of low-tax flexibilities for visiting corporations?
And on the other side, what kind of media environment should we have in an independent Scotland? It’s not enough for Salmond to say that media regulation is a reserved matter, thus debarring him from taking any critical position on the BSkyB merger. Into such a vacuum rushes all manner of fevered speculation - for example, a Scottish state welcoming News International into a specially-deregulated kailyard, like our ain wee McBerlusconi.
Now, remember this is also a First Minister who launched a Broadcasting Commission aimed at creating (in his words) an “architecture of participation” in this country, inspired by the bottom-up energies of social media and creative programme-makers. So all need not be lost, in a ticker-tape of Tunnocks wrappers.
But on topics like this, and many others (potential NATO membership, or car-centric capital expenditure, being the obvious examples), it’s the job of a somewhat noisy independence movement - and particularly the left and green side of it - to keep the radical-reform instincts of SNP government ministers alive, lurking just beneath those lush pashminas and worsted lapels.
We go into the next two years with this movement showing signs of coherence and vigour, amplified by technology and suffused with talent. Take excellent blogs/bloggers and online magazines like Bella Caledonia, Better Nation, Scottish Left Review, Newsnet Scotland, Lallands Peat Warrior, Bright Green, National Collective and others.
These already comprise the new media of a “radical Scotland” - one that at least matches, and probably surpasses, the fondly remembered political magazine of the 80s. The Scottish Independence Convention (SIC) has for years doggedly kept its doors open to all parties who supported the basic concept, and is now rightly reaping its rewards in terms of centrality and influence. There’s even a Radical Independence Conference occupying (if that’s the right word) a Radisson hotel in Glasgow sometime soon.
A few days ago, I was asked to be on the advisory board of the YesScotland campaign, along with Elaine C. Smith, chairperson of the SIC, Colin Fox of the SSP, and a goodly spread of the other estaits and pairts of contemporary Scotland. I replied with an eager “Yes”.
For what we should be assenting to in this campaign is the possibility of taking Scotland’s side through taking sides in Scotland. A “Yes” vote is not just about the self-evident truth that resident Scots, of all shapes and stripes, are the best people to fully determine their own future.
It’s also a vote in our ability to come up with a progressive direction for our society - and a confidence about that emerging from honest and robust debate about economics, health, defense, education, housing, welfare, media and everything else.
Deep down, I enjoy Alex’s combo of sonsy gladhanding, and fluent statesmanship, as much as the next independista. But if we’re modelling behaviour, we also need to model the diverse engagement, the grass-roots energy, the democratic intellect that we wish to see in the everyday life of an independent Scotland. That’s what I hope for YesScotland. And as the ultimate contrarian, I’m sure Mr Sillars would agree.
This is the unedited version of my Scotsman essay on the SNP leadership's shift away from an anti-NATO foreign policy for an independent Scotland. As ever, all comments welcome. (I appeared on subsequently on a Radio Two show celebrating Costello and Wyatt's great song Shipbuilding, and repeated many of the arguments written here).
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It's a song I've been performing for 25 years now, and I doubt I'll ever stop. Shipbuilding - recorded by Robert Wyatt, with lyrics by Elvis Costello and music by Clive Langer - was a minor hit in the British charts, reaching number 35 on May 28, 1983.
But as a response to the Falklands War, concluded the year before, it's fair to say that Shipbuilding has become a classic of political songwriting. Referencing the Cammell-Laird shipyards of his youth in the Wirral, Costello focused on the moral dilemmas of the skilled working-class and the benefit they derived from the industrial war-machine.
Like many independence-supporting Scots of a left persuasion, I have been extremely disquieted by the recent press speculation about a possible reversal of the SNP’s stance on NATO - from non-involvement, to possible membership after independence. And I can’t get the urgency of Costello’s song out of my head and heart.
The key questions in my mind are these. Is the SNP’s advocacy of membership of NATO rooted in a desire to participate in a wave of reform of this Cold-War-era, nuclear-defined military command?
Or is it a way to retain Scotland’s military-industrial complex - its Rosyths and Clyde shipyards, its bases with ancillary services and industries - under cover of an ostensibly “credible” commitment to European collective security? To be blunt about it: does the SNP need NATO, because NATO will keep us shipbuilding?
Before we even explore these options, I am presuming a “red line” in Scottish independence politics that cannot be crossed - and that is the decommissioning, and then physical removal of Trident missiles from Scottish soil, under the shortest possible timeline, upon the achievement of full independence.
Too many Scots - many of them the disillusioned Labour voters that enable the SNP’s two game-changing electoral victories - have invested their moral hopes in such an outcome, for it to be mitigated or fudged in any way. The removal of Trident cannot be a “Guantanamo closure” that never really closes; nor a version of the shabby, pecuniary leasing arrangement whereby Ukraine derives a rent from hosting Russia’s missiles.
The Scotland-in-NATO question brings it all to a head. The chief objection from the Scottish Left is that NATO still defines itself as a nuclear alliance in the last instance, with the US as its ultimate guarantor, and with “first-use” of weapons still a defining protocol.
We might be able to enter as a “non-nuclear” member - but by doing so, we still legitimate a nuclear umbrella. Even 5 out of the 25 officially “non-nuclear” states in NATO - Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey - host 200 forward-deployed US ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, under a ‘nuclear task sharing’ arrangement.
In terms of the general spirit of non-proliferation, this enduringly nuclear NATO - which include the expansion of a new joint missile defence system, protecting “populations and territories against a ballistic missile attack” as a “core element” of collective defence - is still geopolitically dangerous. In particular, facing this extensive nuclearisation of Europe, Russia is given no incentive to reduce its vast stockpile of missiles.
Yes, there is a “battle of narratives” in NATO presently, as Scottish-based Nato Watch’s Ian Davis puts it - Germany would like to remove US missiles from its soil, with support from Scandinavian nations. In Davis’s view “it would be helpful to have a progressive Scottish voice within NATO, arguing on the side of the angels”.
Yet as he also admits, “if NATO cannot agree to withdraw these anachronistic weapons after three Strategic Concept reviews, it says a lot about the decision-making process (and overall legitimacy) of the alliance”. And, relatedly, about the hubris of a Scotland thinking it can influence such a frozen, big-power-dominated alliance from the inside.
The “credible” position for an independent Scotland might well be to get involved in this melee, for all manner of realpolitik (for example, smoothing the way to EU membership). However, if we want an “ethical foreign policy” - to recall a recent aspiration - we should stand outwith the NATO nuclear umbrella, on the basis of objecting to its current stance as blocking non-proliferation.
In terms of Scotland’s global impact as a newly independent country, don’t we stand to gain hugely, in terms of national branding and progressive soft power - and in a world of asymmetric threats, even in terms of domestic security - if we comprehensively reject our association with the ultimate instruments of hard power?
A sovereign Scotland should be confident enough to allow our post-independence security arrangements and alliances to evolve over time, shaped by debate within a new and invigorated Scottish polity. Rather than seek an ostentatiously and presumptively “credible” posture that implicates us in a nuclear future many Scots are vowed to oppose.
And this brings me to the “shipbuilding” question. Malcolm Chalmers’ very useful research paper for the Scotsman on the future of defence in an independent Scotland sets out the hard budgetary realities. Derived from the spending of comparable small NATO states, like Norway and Denmark, Chalmers estimates a Scottish defense budget of between £1.7 and £2.1 billion - though Lithuania’s is £0.9 billion, and non-NATO Ireland is £0.6 billion.
Barring the effective protection of resources in sea territories, and contributions to coordinated anti-terror measures and humanitarian missions, what requires Scotland to spend unnecessary billions of precious post-independence revenue on its military?
Going by SNP advisor Jennifer Dempsie’s recent column in this paper, the main argument would seem to be sustaining our military-industrial complex. She suggests a Scottish defense budget of £2.5 billion, an increase on current UK spending here, which would help the Scottish Government to “stand up for Govan”. She explicitly cites BAE Systems, currently toiling to build an aircraftless aircraft carrier for the Royal Navy, as worthy of attention when the job is finished in 2015. “In an independent Scotland”, she writes, “our yards will secure orders on the basis of their skills and record – Scottish shipyards already build ships for countries outside the UK”.
Hold on a minute. Am I expected to express economic patriotism for BAE Systems as a “Scottish shipyard”? The BAE that pays hundreds of millions in fines for breaking military export rules of its weaponry to unstable nations, and for perpetrating wholesale bribery throughout the Middle East?
Dempsie vaunts Scotland’s “unique facilities and skills” for collaborative defence procurement. Might that include, perhaps, the collective procurement demanded by Scotland’s active NATO membership? This sounds less like an engaged agenda for “shaping the narrative” of the Alliance - and more about ensuring business for our military sector.
There seems to be an insufficiency of imagination and will in the SNP that swords can be turned into ploughshares - or to use the technical term, “arms conversion and diversification”. Are we unable to imagine diverting, say, a billion of the SNP’s projected defense budget towards an investment in civil R&D - and in particular, the range of sustainable technologies and infrastructures that we claim as our primary economic and productive future? Ian Davis, and Isobel Lindsay of Scottish CND, both suggest that we should set up a commission to accurately determine Scottish “national needs” in military provision.
There is a lingering militarism in Scottish national identity, from our cheesier national anthems to our ambivalence towards the “bonnie fechters” of our regiments. Sometimes, I think it quietly conditions the responses of those who, in the main, have the very best interests of Scotland at heart. Let's also be electorally informed here. For an SNP worried about their low support among women - who also poll much higher in their opposition to nukes and military interventions than men - can they afford to signal a shift toward a NATO still bristling with militial menace?
We need a substantive public debate about Scottish independence and NATO. Properly and intelligently conducted, it will show us off to the watching world at our best. To slightly rewrite one of Costello’s lines: we are skilled in more, much more, than warship-building.
This is an essay the Scotsman commissioned me to do on the crazy-maybe-not-so crazy idea of a “Labour for Independence” campaign at the coming Independence Referendum in 2014. A bit of miscommunication meant that I originally wrote a much longer piece than has eventually appeared - the unedited version runs below, the edited version is here.
I also received some excellent pre-publication responses from political commentator Gerry Hassan, and a new voice to Thoughtland - Cailean Gallagher, the young editor of the Oxford Left Review, who is (as far as I know) the only “out” Labour party member supporting independence. These are printed below the main piece. And of course, all comments (from all comrades!) welcome.
Labour For Independence Isn’t Such a Mad Idea
Pat Kane, The Scotsman, Feb 9, 2012
Unedited version below (1763 words). Edited and published version (950 words) here.
THE SCENE is the aftershow of a riotously joyful Celtic Connections gig. I have just met one of my oldest friends in the Scottish music scene - a great facilitator of the business of rock in this country for over thirty years. A smart, sophisticated man (he once included a book of Seamus Heaney poems in my dressing-room rider) we naturally fall to talking about politics.
I’m surprised to find out that he describes himself as “virulently Labour”. How virulently? “I have to confess a terrible thing”, he says. While half-smeeked at a recent cultural opening, he tottered over to a notoriously sweet-natured Scottish Government minister and asked her, “you still a member of the Scottish Nazi Party?”
It’s so ludicrous I have to laugh out loud. “But you see, I’m of that generation”, he explains. “Hate narrow nationalism. Closer to a worker in Liverpool than a laird in Ullapool. You cut me, I bleed Labour”. You’re a bit in trouble then in the old homeland, aren’t you? “You could say that”, he murmured, gripping his German beer.
For those of us who would describe ourselves as “Scottish Left”, and who see independence as the most immediate lever to realise our values and visions, it’s chastening to come out of our echo chambers and hear just how subcutaneous some political identities are. I sent my friend scurrying off with the challenge, “Come on now! You should be starting Labour for Independence!” Out of the mouths of party-animals...
Yet even as a piece of social-science fiction, it’s an interesting concept. Under what conditions - say, the next 24 months leading up to the most important political event in 300 years for Scotland - could a “Labour for Independence” exist?
One basic argument for the existence of Labour for Independence is the need for strategic thinking about the party’s survival, if a majority for independence is achieved. If the current Scottish Labour leadership’s claim is sincerely held - that is, willing to serve Scotland, no matter the constitutional arrangement - then it seems somewhat reckless for the Scottish Labour movement not to develop some sense of their platform in a future independent country.
Many on the Scottish Left have given the SNP our crucial votes, regarding them as the main instrument towards achieving full sovereignty (though with the Greens, and in past years the ultra-left parties, as other options).
But post the Great Day, would we necessarily wish to find ourselves with a “National Party of Scotland”, to quote Salmond’s words immediately after the May 2011 victory: a party fully vindicated in its mission, and awaiting a electoral mandate which might even extend (according to some recent polls) their current command of the Scottish polity?
I don’t question the talents, commitment and values of the SNP Cabinet, MSPs and wider membership. But one-party dominance would not be healthy for a newly independent country, which would need all available minds and talents on hand to steer us through the rapids of realpolitik, geopolitics and globalisation.
Would Scottish Labour - or at least some significant chunk of it - really want to be on the sidelines at this vital moment? Despite the fury this would cause in the current leadership, would it not be prudent for some groupuscules in the People’s Party to start brewing up some wisdom, strategy and research around their post-independence existence?
Of course, in an earlier, less acute stage of the “process-not-event” of Scottish self-determination, we have seen innovation of this kind from the Labour Party in Scotland. Jim Sillars famously broke off from being a hammer of the Nats to found the Scottish Labour Party, and thence to the SNP itself (his old compadre in the SLP, Alex Neil, is now a well-behaved Enterprise Minister for the Scottish Government).
From the 80’s, the ginger-group Scottish Labour Action once contained both Wendy Alexander and Jack McConnell in its ranks. SLA produced confident pamphlets about Labour’s “home rule” traditions which envisaged much more “fiscal autonomy” than anything proposed by the Party at present. And of course, not forgetting the mavericks of old, like John McAllion, Dennis Canavan and (perhaps) Malcolm Chisholm, dormant volcanoes of “independent-mindedness” in the Scottish Labour party.
In this current vertiginous stage of the “process”, is Scottish Labour capable of the same kind of innovation? Certainly, if the Labour leadership line holds against constructing an answer to the SNP’s “Devo Max” proposition, Labour for Independence might become a necessity for some.
UK Labour let the musculature of federalism go to waste in its 14-year Westminster dominance. They spurned the chance to cement a “progressive majority”, through a steady argument for PR with Lib-Dems as allies. This allowed the Orange Book Liberals to come through and get their sweaty palms on the reins of power. Salmond’s calculation may well be based on this historical failure. With Devo-Max, he’s offering the federal key to a pallid political constituency that can barely raise a trembling finger to respond.
Incidentally, constitutional literacy, and pluralist thinking, is not dead in the UK Labour Party. Compass - shaped by political guru Neal Lawson, who has invited me to speak at its London conferences many times - is the residue of an intelligent centre-left that reaches out to Greens, Scottish and Welsh nationalism, and the wetter Lib-Dems, in an organisation which is now open to non-Labour-Party members. But their presence in Scotland is barely established.
Thus we will witness the gory spectacle of Scottish Labour epigones sharing, or half-sharing, or phoning in that they’re sharing platforms with Westminster Coalition politicians. They will defend a “Union” which retains domestic and offensive nukes, which accepts spending cuts over capital investment and Keynesian stimulation, which is currently privatising and stratifying its health and education services in England... We can imagine the SNP’s gleeful framing of all this, and its brightly positive responses.
Does every member, and every MSP, in Scottish Labour really want to be lining up alongside the serried horrors of Westminster, associating themselves with an acid rain of negativity, fear-stories and condescension? Or might at least some of them want to argue a Labour case for independence which allows them to speak as the social-democrats, or democratic-socialists, they are in their hearts?
I’m on the steering group of the Jimmy Reid Foundation precisely because, like its founder, it creates a space on the left in Scotland for economic equity and social justice that includes - or at least doesn’t exclude - the context of independence. Its first report on government procurement, written by SNP stalwarts and economists Jim and Margaret Cuthbert, is a perfect example of how an SNP government can find a “critical friend” in a Scottish Left, now fully alive to the possibilities of maximal self-determination.
How do we assert a national economic interest over £9billion pounds worth of Scottish government expenditure? What’s the proper argument between “value for money” for the Scottish taxpayer (often returned via successful overseas bidders for Scottish contracts), and supporting indigenous enterprises - and what does that imply for the strategic usage of the economic powers of statehood?
The question of the demilitarisation of Scottish society - from nuclear missiles to Hamish Henderson’s “braggarts crousely crawing” - is something that has animated a Scottish Left for decades. Yet the highest of moral high-grounds in the national conversation is currently held by the SNP, in terms of its implacable opposition to Trident and its thoroughly non-adventurous conception of our “defence” forces.
Is every Labour supporter blithely happy to attack independence as a threat to our military-industrial (or even just military-employment) complex? In terms of the sheer difficulty and expense of relocating Trident from Coulport (as recently indicated by the Ministry of Defence), could not a hypothetical “Indy-Labour” support a “Yes” vote - as an instrument towards the removal of these weapons of mass destruction from these islands as a whole? And is there no appetite or ability to plan for “swords-into-ploughshares” left in the labour movement?
When framed in an independence context, a few of Scottish Labour’s current policy positions begin to make at least some kind of sense. Their opposition to SNP plans to lower the rate of corporation tax rings hollow, if we think of Scottish Labour as part of the same party which rampantly deregulated finance in the City of London under Gordon Brown.
But placed in an independence context, it starts a real debate about national economic strategy, one brought to a focus regularly over the years by the political scientist Micheal Keating. In his words from 2007, “An independent Scotland could thus be not only viable but successful, but only with structural change accompanying independence. One form would be the deregulated, low tax model, open to international business. Another would be a concerted and networks economy, with a stronger emphasis on public services and high-value activities. Little of this, however, features in the political debate.”
Or to be precise, the SNP - in their public discourse at least - try to transcend both forms: low-tax and pro-enterprise on one side, the “social wage” and the “commonweal” on the other. Can it really be done? We haven’t even touched the Greens’ critique of petro-fuelled growth in Scotland, solidly within the context of independence - that’s for another time. A proper left-green critique of the SNP’s macro-economics is required. But it won’t be remotely credible coming from a Scottish party so associated with the bubble-wrapped neo-liberalism of the New Labour years.
However, a small sliver of that party - audibly imagining itself operating under independence, and bringing its positive, constructive visions of political economy to that society - might have a chance of being heard. They might also be the penicillin that keeps the Labour Party from expiring entirely in a post-independence Scotland.
Back at the rock’n’roll gig... I left my “cut-me-I-bleed-Labour” friend with a hug across his shoulders. We’ve worked together in this country for nearly a quarter of a century, and we’re certainly not going to let the difference between left-nationalist and democratic-socialist sully that in the slightest.
“But promise me”, he pleaded at the last, “the SNP will disband as soon as they get independence, won’t they?” I doubt that very much, I answered. But for the health of the country, I hope that some in Scottish Labour are thinking about how they’ll cope, and maybe even thrive, in the early days of a fully sovereign nation.
Continue reading "Labour For Independence? Essay for The Scotsman " »
Some Ne'erday thoughts on politics in 2012. All comments welcome. (I will be hyperlinking references in this piece over the next few days).
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We hear that a "prospectus" for the independence option in the referendum is being prepared in the bowels of the SNP - a "little blue-and-white book" which will provide a coherent policy framework, for citizens considering what will probably be the biggest political decision of their lives.
Quite a few columnists have been noting with wry interest how the year's end has brought what seems like the UK establishment's praise of Alex Salmond, as a major political figure on these islands (eg, The Times' "Briton of the Year"). In a gripping stretch of realpolitik, the Labour activist Ian S Smart wonders whether this is an "Ally's Army" episode - the UK building us up for a world-changing moment, ready to catch us in their Unionist embrace as we inevitably fall short of our ideal and reject independence, leaving a quiescent, depressed and tractable Scotland.
Yet isn't it equally possible that a properly-bolted-together prospectus for independence would be one of the more significant cultural "memes" of the next 18 months - one which might reverberate beyond the London media, and become part of a global conversation about democracy and self-determination? Debate about the independence process often talks about the significant "holes" in the SNP's position. As a Unionist tactician, Smart is clear as a bell about how to exploit them. For him, it's only the threat that independence will disrupt the continuity of pensions or welfare benefits, of access to BBC shows or easy financial transactions across the border, that's needed to secure a clear majority against.
Yet perhaps there's a much "higher road" than one where focus groups can be negatively targeted with, in Smart's words, "frightening effectiveness". There's an old saying in Scottish politics about never underestimating the intelligence of the Scottish electorate. Surely some of those smarts come from living through a period where the constitutional question has, at the very least, inserted an awareness of how governance, at a macro-level, matters to the everyday person. Two effective SNP administrations at Holyrood have made that manifest, through a range of tangible policy differences in education, health and local taxation.
Perhaps we should remind ourselves that Scottish citizens have a level of political awareness which is more acute and lively than in other parts of the island. So the challenge for independistas in 2012 is not to nervously huddle around an obdurate minority in the opinion polls for independence, but to intellectually and rhetorically "work as if they were in the early days of an independent nation", to misquote Alasdair Gray. That is, to stretch and develop their existing understanding of the possible powers of a Scottish Parliament, making concrete and clear what extra benefits (and defences against Tory-Coalition policies) come from statehood.
I think one of the tipping points will be a context in which a Eurosceptic majority looks like solidifying in the English polity and returning a right-wing, small-government Tory regime (perhaps earlier than expected). Against that, I'm sure it's possible to present a joined-up welfare-pensions-and-taxation framework for independence which will look more attractive, even more stable, than a status quo which leaves some of these services and functions to a regime which is fundamentally opposed to concepts such as "the social wage" or "social democracy".
An England spiralling into isolationism will also leave headroom for the SNP's development of their diplomatic and geo-political arguments. A real educational achievement in the popular consciousness for independence would be an awareness that a Scottish state, if democratically mandated, would have the right and the ability to situate itself, in a tailored and unique way, amidst European and global political and economic frameworks. If the debate over the border escalates into an near-referendum moment on whether the UK should remain within Europe under current terms at all, would that allow the Scottish electorate to vote for the pragmatism of keeping international options open, both in a Nordic and a EU direction, in a situation of upheaval and chaos?
Jim Sillars' request that Scots (politicians and citizens) start "thinking like a state" has never been more pertinent - however much I might dissent from details of his analysis. And there are aspects of that state-thinking in the coming "prospectus" which I will probably object to strongly. For all Angus Robertson's character as an individual, I profoundly disagree with his discourse around Scottish armed forces under independence. We need much less of the "our-fair-share-of-the-military-spending" rhetoric, and much more vision about the changed culture of a "Scottish Defence Force" - a clear sense of different priorities about participation in future interventions and peace-keeping, a background recognition that the "great traditions" of Scottish regiments should not be so blithely celebrated. Freedom Come 'A Ye, over Scotland The Brave.
I will also probably be unhappy with any kind of "continuity plan" for broadcasting and media regulation, involving BBC Scotland having greater autonomy under independence (while retaining its title and general programming). I don't believe it's beyond the wit of independence policy-makers to sketch out a future where access to beloved programmes is guaranteed, in a time-shifting and digital multi-channel environment, but where the name-change to an "SBC" or some other title signifies the same shift in seriousness as "Scottish Executive" to "Scottish Government". That is, a Scottish "state" broadcasting service which (of course) parallels the BBC in its constitutional distance from political control, but which at least accepts - as the current BBC Scotland essentially cannot - the basic legitimacy of a Scottish state perspective. Meaning less Central Belt murr-durrs on the nightly news bulletin, and more coverage of a Scotland that will exists in the world of globalisation, and covers the complexities of national progress within that. And much more besides, in terms of the cultural, social, energy and business agenda.
But all that aside... If we can seize 2012 as the year of "education towards independence", I think Comrade Smart's sophisticated but depressive view of the insubstantial nature of Scottish political will for independence can be overturned. If he's right about the "Devo Max" option being a non-starter for the Unionist parties - which remains to be seen, and that's another post - then an independence movement has a clear run at a prospect which only asks us to be at our best, as persuaders, thinkers, tactitians and activists. In a world where there are enough grand narratives of despair available, we should enjoy the opportunity to argue for a tangible achievement of progress and modernity.
For 'a that, and 'a that, it's comin' yet...
Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - the second part of my consideration of the SNP's victory in the last Holyrood election. This one looks at the below 50% turnout on May 5 - and asks how independence politics can reach out to those, particularly at the poorer end of society, and connect full sovereignty to better life-prospects. All comments welcome.
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The big speeches have been delivered, the seats are being generously warmed, the gears of Scottish government crank back into action. The second SNP administration, having democratically secured a working majority in political system designed for rule-by-coalition or minority government, finds itself in a unique position.
In the campaign for office, many winning political parties find themselves almost instantly lacking in credibility. Manifesto promises that claim to be tightly connected to governmental levers can loosen and unravel, as the black (and evenly mildly grey) swans of economic turbulence swim into view.
Yet the SNP government has a unprecedented political mandate to seek extra levers of economic and resource power in Scotland - and it seems that the British state is rattled enough to concede at least some of those. So the SNP resoundingly win the electoral game of policy ambition in Scotland - and then get the chance to change the rules of the game, so they can increase economic revenue and reliably answer those ambitions.
Short of their magical majority, trapped in a minimally reformed devolution, how quickly would they have run into a hailstorm of broken promises and manifesto retrenchment? Salmond is a noted gambler, but this is brand new territory: on May 5th he didn't just win the bet, he got the option to change the lease on the betting shop at the same time. As a spectacle of political achievement in a media-and-marketing age, as I wrote here last week, the SNP victory will be a sophisticated case-study for ambitious parties throughout the world.
But as I also mentioned last week, it was too much of a spectacle also - a political majority resting on around a quarter of the total possible electorate, in a plebiscite where just under half of those able to vote (49.8%) could be bothered to do so.
In the mid-90s, under James Boyle's dynamic era at BBC Radio Scotland (ochone, ochone), I was sent to Harvard to interview the great Scots-Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith, about his 1992 book The Culture of Contentment. His rumbling anxiety was that levels of political participation in US politics were worryingly correlated with class benefit. Those who did vote were responding to appeals to their evident economic self-interest - low taxes, strong on law and order, protectionism for US industry.
Those who didn't were either literally disenfranchised (due to the US's appalling rules on criminality and voter registration, which Obama's 2008 campaign determinedly overcame). Or if they were franchised, people were disgusted with the whole institution of politics, their civic will corroded by the general downpour of stories about political corruption and scandal - and so chose not to exercise their democratic right.
I hope that people vastly better equipped in political science than me (and less in a freelance hurry) are planning to examine the mind-set and attitudes of this 50% of non-participants in the Scottish Spring. What is the balance between Scots unregistered to vote, and Scots registered but choosing not to? I'm guessing we don't have US-style barriers to registration in Scotland, but I'd still like to know the rates.
And as for the rest of this slight-but-silent majority, which of them gaze upon the operations of the Scottish Parliament (hardly free from scandal politics over the years) with the same general jaundice and cynicism as, say, the residents of Detroit or Cleveland?
I've only one family anecdote to bring to this doubtless empirical question: the despair of a relative who was delivering (and urging the completion of) census forms around his Lanarkshire neighbourhood. "So many of them were angry at you, chasing you from the door. Or they were just so totally out of it with drugs or depression that they simply couldn't get it together to fill it in. I had no idea so many people in this area were so basically incapable of functioning."
In my dispute with Jim Sillars in the Scotsman last week about his concept of "independence-lite" - where we decide, in advance of any constitutional vote on independence, to agree certain shared powers with the UK government - I objected to his notion that "social security" would be one of those "cross-border" functions we'd be happy to cede.
Are we really so happy to fall in with two decades of neo-liberal or Third Way workfare policies? Do we want to continue to compel the armies of surplus labour in Scottish society to take low-paid service jobs in a retail-led, hyper-consumerised economy - hundreds of thousands of Scots acutely aware of their low social status, in an already very unequal society? As we now know from studies like The Spirit Level, self-perception of lowly social status literally degrades the minds, bodies and health of the poor.
Might it also unravel their willingness to be involved in a once-every-five-years plebiscite, of any kind?
Any forward movement in Scottish society has to deal with poverty, its distortions of the human spirit. And that's why the Galbraith thesis doesn't quite work for the 50% who did vote - and, to be honest, the vast majority of those who generally voted (between SNP, Labour, Lib Dems and Greens) for a broadly left-of-centre, Nordic-model platform of manifestos. Cross-party commitments to free education, free health and renewable energy are light years away from Galbraith's US affluent middle-classes actively using their vote to preserve their privatised privileges in each of those areas.
As I wrote last week, the SNP won their majority of votes by layering a psychologically-literate politics of hope and aspiration, in an authentically Scottish register, on top of this broad social-democratic consensus. But as Kenneth Roy's necessary article reminded us a few days after the election, the mandate is based overall on some gey few turn-outs. Glasgow shows alarming figures of participation, almost exactly correlated to poorer areas - only 43% for Nicola Sturgeon in Southside, 38% in the SNP gain of Shettleston, 35% in Provan, Even Salmond's own seat had 48% staying at home.
When Obama unlocked Galbraith's iron-cage of contentment, he did so in a way that clearly gave a campaign template to the SNP - a hopeful and socially-repairing message of national renewal. But he also constructed a huge program of voter registration, and then motivated those voters - meaning significant rises in black/minority, youth and working-class participation in the overall plebiscite, most of these rises going to Obama.
And in a nation often described as a deeply malfunctioning democracy (a "moronic inferno", in Martin Amis's famous words), note that voter turnout was over ten percent higher than ours - 61.7% in the 2008 US election. The only Scottish constituency that cleared 60% participation in May was the Tory-turned-Labour Eastwood - replete, let us say, with enough socio-economic ease that voters might enthusiastically consider their political options.
What does the electoral underbelly of the SNP victory mean for an independence referendum? Duncan Hamilton at the weekend restated the gradualist position for Nationalists: this was a vote for "more good government", with the extension of demands for more powers for devolution continuing that display of forward-looking competence. And a referendum on independence will be won, he suggested, "if the proposals emphasise a sense of national unity and consensus."
How much of the nation will be involved, though? And is that a consensus only among the "unco guid" of can-be-bothered, civically-conscious voters?
The post-Scottish-election debates about the exact definition of independence have been generated by many factors. But for me, it's all been about the need to ensure that a Scottish Parliament has as many effective governmental powers as possible, in order to reduce the shaming inequality of life-chances in Scottish society.
Yes, full fiscal autonomy will support a jobs-creating business environment in Scotland - and as we hope, jobs as part of a green industrial and infrastructural renaissance. My greatest hope is that there will be a renewed demand for the craft and technical skills that constituted the identity of the Scottish working class thirty years ago - but under brand new sustainable values of efficiency, ingenuity and useabilty, where workers have a much less alienated, much more intrinsic investment in the work they do. Not so much a work ethic, but a social-productive ethic - the construction needed for a better-founded society.
We need the entrepreneurs and business-growers who are riding this wave to also think about the quality of employment they're providing for the Scottish people - and where that employment can do most good. Local and national government, in its role as procurer and regulator of services, has much power here to shape green development - and make sure that it brings agency, dignity and resources to all those currently disconnected from the Scottish future.
So would a clear plausible link between the powers of independence, and a new vision of the labouring and productive life in Scotland, reach out to those un-citizens who stayed out of the polling both on May 5th? That link, yes, and perhaps many others in addition to our existing social-democratic menu - around housing, the quality of public space, local provisioning of food, greater voice and input into our mediaspace (ie, don't just sneeringly point cameras at the "cast-list" of The Scheme, but give them the cameras, and the skills, to render their own lives as an empowering narrative).
And for me, one reason to ensure a "full-independence" that has control over armed forces is to begin the demilitarisation of Scottish public life. We must reduce the position of the army as sometimes the only substantial career option available to young men and women in poorer communities, historically and currently. Not forgetting the foul waste of expertise and resources expended on Britain's military-industrial complex. Out of all the songs that we might sing to celebrate a free and fully sovereign Scotland, let's not forget Hamish Henderson's Freedom-Come-'a-Ye.
To make the most of an independence referendum, we need to start to build an independence society - what Gerry Hassan calls "self-determination at every level". Further notes on that anon. But half a country not bothering to decide its own future, even on a classically rainy day, is a warning bell that we must not ignore.
This is the original version of my essay in The Scotsman, "Optimist puts the case for Scotland", which took the SNP colossus Jim Sillars to task for his concept of "independence-lite". All comments welcome.
By Pat Kane
It's fair to say - along with the not-so-gentle student arm-twisting of a newly elected representative for the South of Scotland region - that the veteran SNP grandee Jim Sillars is responsible for my current political identity.
His concept of independence-in-Europe, articulated in his mid 80's book Scotland: A Case For Optimism - and still on the SNP website - was the first time I'd heard a truly sophisticated argument for Scottish independence: about reconnecting to the wider world, not just chippily tilting against our largest near-neighbour.
Somewhere in my personal archives I have a piece of campaign literature from the 1992 SNP campaign, arguing for "The New Union" for Scotland - that is, the European Union, with Scotland as integrated but independent nation-state within it. I also remember seeing Jim at a conference about 10 years ago, arguing with great vision about how an independent Scotland could contribute to the creation of a "strong European feel", which would help legitimate and bolster a European governance that was certainly facing its challenges at that time.
This is personal, too: back to 1992, I shared an SNP Snappy Bus on Jim's last, desparate day as a Govan MP during that years General Election. My admiration for his commitment to, and sympathy for, ordinary voters hasn't diminished from that day to this.
But I have to say, quite clearly, that Jim's current advocacy of what he's calling "independence-lite" is fundamentally wrong - by which I mean the wrong political strategy for a majority SNP government, and an independence movement, readying itself for a momentous referendum.
In his Scotsman article, Jim clearly outlines what he thinks this revised vision of Scottish independence is:
an independent country in international law which has a kind of confederal relationship with England, in which the latter continues to carry out cross-Border functions like the DVLA, perhaps pension and social security payments, and a BBC with beefed up Scottish representation at Trust level. One which engages us in a quasi-Nato relationship on shared defence and security against terrorism, with Scotland paying its share of costs of those functions, plus our share of UK debt, from its sovereignty over all taxation including oil, and perhaps offsetting some of those costs by leasing the Trident base for a long period
What is noticeable, instantly, is the absence of the European Union from this picture. Does this mean that independence-supporters are giving up on playing their part in the policy-forming councils of Europe? Particularly when the general thrust of European policy - on social welfare, on environmental regulation, on urban development, on education - is still much more in line with the Scottish consensus than anything coming from Westminster? This seems a bizarre "Little Britain" horizon to impose on a politics of Scottish independence.
The next trouble-zone is Sillars' check-list of "cross-Border functions". This is one area which requires detailed and vigorous debate among independence supporters, and certainly not some imposed fiat from the high command of the SNP. I guess I'm revealing myself as a "fundi" - and maybe a Green fundi - in this debate, as I find myself unwilling to think that there are any of these functions that wouldn't benefit from a maximum degree of Scottish control.
Relinquishing sovereignty over "pension and social security payment" systems bespeaks a puzzling failure of nerve. Jim is keen to point out how polling support for independence is in the low 30's. I would also like to point out that 50% of the possible Scottish electorate did not even bother to vote in this great democratic moment. Surely we should realise that such citizen apathy is partly explained by the socio-economic deprivations, and psychological exhaustion, of large areas of "forgotten Scotland" (about to burst onto our screens again with BBC Scotland's The Scheme)?
We must have the powers to integrate the boom-time of the "green industrialisation of Scotland" with the need to rebuild the essentials of community life in large areas of this country. Some of that will happen under a cascade of apprenticeships for lads and lassies o' pairts - but new employment isn't the only measure that will heal the scars and distortions of generations of neglect.
We should give ourselves the latitude to think creatively about what social support means in a sustainable Scotland - for example, looking at some of the agenda for shorter working weeks and co-production of services that think-tanks like the New Economics Foundation are suggesting. Again, why should we relinquish policy autonomy over that area, when the current reality is so underdeveloped and ineffective?
Maintaining the BBC with "a beefed-up Scottish presence at Trust level"? This is a real collapse of will-power. In a multi-channel, multi-device, expanding-bandwidth media world, it is not beyond the wit of an independent Scottish media public regulators and institutions to cut licensing and permission deals with the BBC as a content provider, such that the televisual component of the "social union" is easily accessible to anyone in Scotland.
But we should, firstly, be able to spend what we actually raise in Scottish public broadcasting, and secondly, take the chance to amplify the Scottish voice within and outwith the country. This would be an opportunity for creative and administrative innovation which, I would expect, Scottish mediators should jump at.
Maximal sovereign control of national public media and its regulation also has an impact on Scotland economically and geopolitically. How can our media better support the quality of expert and strategic conversation about possible Scottish futures in this country? In an age of spectrum plenitude, is it beyond us to think of public channels that properly serve our imperatives in say, education, business development, arts and culture? (I argued for this in my submission to the Scottish Broadcasting Commission).
And even in terms of big-ticket investments in quality television and film, are we really able to make clear-headed decisions about this, when the ultimate gravity of decision-making still rests in Wood Lane?
On what would seem like a minor matter of the DVLA: of course we can organise European-continent-style, cross-border ease of mobility and registration - we have the systems to make that easy and possible. But in a low-carbon era when the regulation of personal transport will become a big issue - and where incentives to cleaner kinds of vehicles might need to be applied - again, do we leave this entirely to Westminster which is, cross-party, environmentally static, if not regressive? Why should we surrender our governmental imagination here?
Finally, on Jim's suggestions of pooled defence and security arrangements, Nato-friendliness, and acceptance of Trident, we come to a position which will easily split the community of independence supporters and activists right down the middle. Of course, Scotland's military posture always been the elephant in the room of independence. Listening to leading SNP politicians "defend Scotland" and its rights to UK military investment in hi-tech engineering, or local military bases, has always been a thoroughly unedifying and incoherent spectacle.
But surely in a post-Iraq-and-Afghanistan, post-Black-Watch Scotland, we should be maintaining our ambivalence about Scottish armed forces being readily dragged into the adventurism (and energy opportunism) of larger nations at the fag-end of Empire. This means a proper separation from Nato, at best United Nations involvement, and appropriate (but well-monitored) collaborations on terrorism and security. Not to mention the sheer waste of intellect and expertise of significant sectors of Scottish engineering being consumed with aircraft-less aircraft carriers, at a time when we should be shoving our productive clusters full-speed towards renewable energy development.
For many of us who came into independence politics from the left, the idea of nursemaiding Trident for two decades - soothing the ex-superpower traumas of post-imperial Britain, in return for confederal autonomy - is the point at which we exit. And that Jim can even countenance a 20-year period in which Trident is slowly managed into obsolescence, while still being the useless and exorbitant phallus of UK geopolitical potency, makes me wonder whether this is the same man I knew 25 years ago.
Finally, the question of keeping a bruised UK Westminster government "onside" in negotiations for independence, soothing the trauma of losing their big-power status by allowing them to retain Trident and other visible structures of Union, is to me wrongly posed.
Cock an ear to current debates within the centre-left in England, particularly around the Compass group in the Labour Party, and their presumption is that a Scotland heading for independence will be a catalyst for all kinds of progressive coalitions in an English polity. It could drive sections of the Lib Dems and Labour closer together, keeping the door open for a much more proportional electoral system (attracting disillusioned Lib Dems). These debates are also addressing what a truly refounded English national identity would be, shorn of the delirium tremens of the post-Imperial hangover - taken away from defensiveness or big-power angst.
Our movement towards independence is actually assisting the rise of a post-British England, which growing numbers of Southern progressives want the chance to explore
Scottish independence may indeed threaten "English state interests". But the view from their end of the telescope may be less obdurately statist, or at least more fluid and in process, than Jim believes. They think we're militant and strident about self-determination: why give any other impression?
On share of national debt and revenue from hydrocarbons, I'm reasonably confident that our resident phalanx of patriotic Scottish energy economists and Scottish laywers, armed with global references and precedents, will get a good (if not ideal) result. Jim tries to imply a devil's trade between a reasonable deal on the resource foundations of an independent Scotland, and the retention of large and toxic features of the governance of the British State. I think he's wrong, and very strangely for him, something of a feartie here.
At exactly this moment - when a demonstrable Nationalist competence in government, and vision of the future, has gathered significant support in Scottish life - it seems weird to suddenly reduce our ambitions, and give up on campaigning for the necessary prize of nation-state independence. Even on the level of Brand Scotland (never mind "Team Scotland"), we'll get one shot to unambiguously and significantly re-appear on the world stage of globalisation. Should we do it in a half-assed way? Are we any less of a national polity than any of the post-Communist nations, who negotiated their independence from a much larger and more pernicious power than tottering, querulous 21st century Britain?
Federalism or confederalism are coherent, legitimate Unionist options, which should be compressed into a second option in a referendum, and put to the Scottish people. But to blur the clarity of independence's powers over crucial, and even morally urgent, dimensions of Scottish self-determination, is to me profoundly mistaken. Never mind the last gasp of the Union - is this the last gasp of Scottish inferiorism? And, as I've said throughout this piece, much more in sorrow than anger, from the most unexpected of sources?
As the constitutional expert Robert Hazell said at the weekend, "Defence, macroeconomic policy and foreign affairs are key features of statehood. Does the SNP want Scotland to be independent or not?" Over to you, Jim.
Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - the first part of a two-part head-scratching about how the SNP won so big in last week's election, by means of some of the latest thinking from cognitive science (as summarised by Manuel Castells in Communication Power). The second part will look at how the same communicational strategies would work in an independence referendum. All comments welcomed.
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Given the way the SNP’s electoral machine ripped up the proportional checks and balances of a Unionist-devised parliament, turned Labour urban heartlands into SNP urban heartlands, and siphoned votes from both Liberal Democrats and the Greens, I doubt they’ll ever forget.
Independistas are still doubtless rubbing their eyes at the sheer fact of a majority party in Holyrood whose stated aim is the establishment of a Scottish nation-state. I think there’ll be more than a little strategic staggering around for a few weeks yet, as new MSPs and newly empowered SNP party grandees wonder exactly how to translate their manifesto commitments into a policy programme for the next five years.
But I’ve deliberately opened with Salmond’s well-polished quote because I want to dwell on the means and methods of this seismic event in Scottish history. If we don’t really understand what led up to 5 May 2011 – and particularly the seemingly miraculous six-week turnaround from defeat to victory – I don’t think we’ll have the proper foundations for any conceivably successful campaign in the independence referendum. (I’ll come to my ambivalence about how many options there should be on the ticket in a later column.)
This is a properly modest contribution, given the manifest brilliance of the SNP’s campaign team – who are doubtless already scheming away. But Salmond’s admonition at the beginning gave me an intellectual itch. Was that the case? Do positive campaigns always defeat negative ones?
Cognitive science says “Mostly, yes”. I’ve been ploughing through the Catalan sociologist Manuel Castells’ 2009 book Communication Power, which provides an incredible overview of the science of politics in a media age. Much of it comes from US studies into how emotion (values and habits) is essentially at the seat of voters’ political decisions, rather than just rational calculation of self-interest.
This is the lesson that US Republicans learned over many years, using the best psychological expertise of Madison Avenue to select images and phrases that triggered primary emotions. And it’s a lesson that (excepting Clinton and Obama) the Democrats generally forget, preferring to aim detailed and statistical policies at the rational minds of voters.
The basic psychological–neurological mechanisms that underpin what Castells calls “emotional politics” almost instantly begin to shed light on the SNP’s transformative victory. To begin with, it’s all about the mirror-neurons: the fact that when we see an action performed in the world, the same part of our brain fires up as if we were performing that action ourselves. As George Lakoff says, “the use of the same neural structure for experience, and representation of experience, has enormous political consequences”.
Parties or politicians should now be aware that everything they do and say, and the forms in which they do so, is shaping voters in much deeper ways that they’d previously thought.
Crucially, the brain builds frames – made from culture and language, but resulting in new, physical patterns of neurons – to make use of these primary responses to others. The political prize for creating the most compelling emotional frame – whether you’re making TV shows, advertising or a political campaign – is huge. Castells’ research says that it’s this emotionally-rooted frame which actually shapes what facts and information you find relevant in any argument. Establish your frame in people’s minds, and they’ll literally see reality – including the details and priorities of policy – your way.
Clearly this is what the SNP’s campaign – reportedly begun in August 2010 – fully achieved. But how, exactly? Castells identifies two deep emotional responses that are particularly relevant to politics: enthusiasm and fear.
Fear triggers anxiety, uncertainty and an increase in political calculation in the voter, who widens their search for more information about the other parties, carefully evaluating options. But if you can incite enthusiasm, the voter narrows down their search for other options, and exhibits “goal seeking behaviour” towards those enthusiastic parties and politicians. Political enthusiasm “creates positive emotions by directing an individual towards experiences and situations that produce pleasure and reward”.
All parties in this election fully bombarded the voters with anxiety-generating statistics and policy options – aimed at the “rationally calculating” citizen. But the SNP almost certainly had the campaign with the most enthusiastic, culturally uplifting overtones. There were bright, collective slogans: “Be Part of Better”, “Let’s Work Together” (tied to an evocative rock song) and “Together We Can Make Scotland Better”. There were Hollywood-style campaign launches, and steady streams of substantial celebrity and leading-figure endorsements (guilty as charged).
Yes, at the heart of this was a defensible policy record, and a credible policy manifesto, weapons available to use at the traditional rationalist hustings moment if necessary. But the SNP’s overall cloud of positivity managed to cast every other party in the role of complainers and carpers on the sidelines. Castells quotes research on ads in American political campaigns that say if you engage voters with an enthusiastic appeal, their prior political choices firm up: that is, the symbolic “frame” of the campaign reinforces the neural “frame” (or predisposition) in the citizen’s mind.
As the SNP was already the incumbent party, with a clear electoral base surrounded by floating voters, the positive campaign probably encouraged half-hearted SNP supporters to vote full-heartedly. And it possibly encouraged full-hearted ones to respond to the “both votes SNP” appeal of the final week – thus breaking the anti-majority structural bias of the Holyrood parliament. Scottish Labour ran a campaign almost entirely aimed at the “fear” frame of the emotional citizen.
According to Castells’ studies of American politics, it was almost textbook Republican stuff. One of the most powerful and deep emotional triggers (or “somatic markers”) that politicians can reach for is fear of death. Communication Power shows how Republicans successfully used the “existential threat to the nation” after 9/11 to build public support for military actions, the factual justification for which was either ill-founded or fallacious. In the grip of a successful “death-fear” framing, rational or empirical counter-argument mattered little to American opinion.
The interesting subtlety that Castells notices is between anxiety and anger. A fear-based rhetoric that clearly identifies a wrong-do-er, and rouses anger against them - Bin Laden or Saddam - has the same cognitive effect as an enthusiastic appeal: it focusses rather than diffuses citizens minds, leading to "an imprudent processing of events", a desire for justice that narrows down the search for other options.
What was Labour’s knife-crime policy other than a direct (and tawdry) appeal to “fear of death”? Now, according to the cognitive science, what fear and anxiety does is to impel voters to begin to seek out more information and to “carefully evaluate” other options. Yet this also tends to diffuse voting intention, rather than firm it up – and in any case, the SNP were ready with a “positive” response of “1,000 more police on the beat”.
Rather scarily, what we should be thankful for is that the Labour Party didn't identify a folk-devil to turn general anxiety about knife-crime into focussed anger - for example, party-political broadcasts of marauding neds across bucolic housing schemes. (If John McTernan, one of their chief advisers, had got his way, the images would have been much worse).
The second fear strategy deployed by Labour in the last week was “fear of deprivation” – the consequence of an SNP vote leading to independence, and all the societal “chaos” that implied. Yet again, the SNP used its incumbency to remind voters of the continuity and stability of the last four years of Scottish government.
Castells often talks about the natural and instinctive politician being able to emotionally resonate, using cultural metaphors and symbols, with his or her constituency. Salmond’s summation of the popular judgement on the SNP’s first term in government – “Aye, they’ve done no’ bad, they deserve another kick o’ the ball” – is an effortless example.
Castells also talks about hope as a powerful emotional underpinning of politics. “Hope is a fundamental ingredient in activating brain maps that motivate political behaviour oriented towards achieving wellbeing in the future, as a consequence of action in the present,” he writes. “Hope is a key component of political mobilisation… Fear is essential for self-preservation. But hope is essential for survival because it allows individuals to plan the outcome of their decisions, and it motivates them to move toward a course of action from which they expect to benefit.”
Of course, “hope” (not to mention “change you can believe in”) was the 2008 Obama campaign’s great slogan (Castells provides a magisterial analysis of that in Communication Power). But “change you can believe in” was almost the invisible subtitle running under every part of the SNP’s campaign. If hope is “essential because it allows individuals to plan the outcome of their decisions” and “motivates them to move towards a course of action from which they expect to benefit”, then the SNP’s “Scottish Hope” tied those practical aspirations to the functioning of a Scottish parliament.
Scottish Labour’s other peddled scare – “fear of Tory Westminster” (chimed by all the other non-Tory Unionist parties) – might have had the desired effect of getting undecided voters to seek information about those generating the fear. Castells says that anxiety also weakens the general intention to even participate in a voting process.
And those who did eventually turn to examine the SNP as the “scary” party would have found a “hopeful” narrative and framing about their life in Scotland – a narrative that had at least the possibility of answering their citizen’s desires to take more control of, and get more benefit from, their lives.
Again, Scottish Labour didn't manage to transform anxiety about independence, or rule from Tory Westminster, into anger. It would seem that over a decade of the Scottish Parliament has gradually answered the desires of Scottish citizens for more power in their own lives - desires thwarted, and therefore transformable into much angry protest, in my heyday political era of the 80's and 90's.
Might this analysis also account for the failure of the Greens (which I regretted – I was looking forward to a much stronger voice for sustainability in the parliament)? They sallied forth on their own “fear-oriented” politics – the keynote being “we’ll raise taxes to defend you against Tory-imposed cuts”, within a general horizon of looming environmental collapse.
Greens have a joyful, convivial, optimistic political message buried away in their thinking and practice – I’ve written about this in the Scottish context before (here and here) – but in the face of the SNP’s Juggernaut of Joy, none of the attractive aspects of sustainable lifestyle change could remotely come through. Change You Couldn’t Believe In, one might say.
I’ll come to the SNP’s particular use of media, new and old, in the next column – and how that can be tweaked and refined for an independence campaign. But Castells’ summary of information-age politics is worth chewing over: “Creating new content and new forms, in the networks that connect minds and their communicative environment, is tantamount to rewiring our minds.”
So the SNP rewired our minds: you heard it here first. Or at least, that is, the minds of the less than one million who gave their vote to the party, on a turnout of just under 50 per cent. About which democratic insufficiency, and its remedy, tune in next week.
Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - closing reflections on writing columns before election days, the commonalities of the Scottish political classes, some regrettable structures of feeling in our national lives, & hoping that the politics of hope will triumph on May 5th. All comments welcome.
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I must have written four or five pre-election columns in my quarter-century of journalism - and they're always a hostage to fortune.
I remember writing something before an election in which "Scotland free by 93" was offered to the people (which the people then primly rejected). If anyone would like to mortify me with memories of said column, which inflicted upon its readers a sci-fi projection of Scotland in 2033... Well, let's hope the digital archives don't go back that far.
But here we are in 2011, with one vaguely futuristic Parliament building under our belts; an anti-dystopian rallying cry for renewable energy to save Scotland from the worst of the anthropocene; and a column being mostly thumbed out on a device which bears close resemblance to the tricorder of my beloved childhood Star Trek.
I promise to reflect in another 25 years time, if I last that long, on my immediate conditions on the eve of a national election. (By that time, I might be literally plugged into something... hopefully something cool and cyborg-y. Rather than merely respiratory)
Will Scotland be independent by that point? As is often quoted, there's a steadily increasing, not decreasing, number of nation-states in the world. Like my old Scottish left mentors Neal Ascherson and Tom Nairn would say, it may well be a world of increasing integration and interdependence - where networked capitalism, and a borderless environmental crisis, both demand as much coordinated global action between democracies as possible.
But for a stateless nation like Scotland (similar to other sub-nations or regions in, say, post-communist Europe), there's no point in not going for the minimum effective regime of geopolitical agency - meaning the nation-state. You should at least give yourself full sovereignty before you begin to parcel it out to wider frameworks, whether they be Westminster, Nordic, European, corporate, global.
Unless some new version of the Treaty of Westphalia comes along, the nation-state is still the crucial means whereby ordinary citizens can find some democratic purchase, as Nairn might put it, on the juggernaut of modernity - even if it's only a light touch on the wheel and the brakes, along with many other small hands and feet.
Which brings us back to tomorrow: Scottish election day, May 5th 2011. Having watched far too much political transmedia over the last few weeks, I've been struck by the patterns of convergence that knit together all the Scottish political classes.
There would seem to be some basic Lego-bricks of Scottish society that all agree on. One is that small businesses, whether family-owned community concerns or thrusting young tech start-ups, are the seedbeds of the modern Scottish economy - an "enterprise" culture, whether social or commercial, that's become a healthy, secular norm of an active, creative Scotland.
Another is that the NHS is totemic, its resources ring-fenced like a sacred cow. I wonder whether this is both an indication of the settled social-democratic will of Caledonia, and an understandable clinging to a service which has to work hard to mitigate far too many wilfully self-destructive physical lifestyles. We may need to further customise the happiness/wellbeing agenda currently gripping the developed world, for a country whose epidemiology is almost the very definition of thrawnness.
And one more component: that orderly streets, visibly and strictly policed, is the prime requirement of public space in Scotland. Funding is easily procured for more bobbies on the beat, armed with customised laws. Meanwhile, our collective outdoor expressions of joy are regarded as potential boondoggles in the making (the Homecoming), or cynical machines for printing sporting money (Ryder Cup, Commonwealth games), or scenes for young male pathology (the Old Firm clashes, Kelvingrove park on the day of the Royal Wedding).
Something in me always curls up and dies when any of the parties go heavy on the law and order agenda - as if there's an element in the Scottish psyche which always remains a Jekyll, fearing its inner Hyde. This interleaves all too neatly with the supposed "excellence" of our crime-fiction industry - a bunch of narrative carrion-crows on Scotland's deprived and distorted urban/suburban realms. There are too many streets and localities in this land where longterm structural deprivation meets what Neal Ascherson once described to me as a punitive "lovelessness" in Scottish daily life: a seeping suffusion of anger and ill-will, ensnaring both accused and accuser.
Tomorrow, whatever arrangement of parties takes the helm of the super-powered milk-van that is devolved Scotland, it would be good if this great concertation of policy could be bent towards the gentling and beatifying of Scottish civic life; the increase of understanding and civility across all political and cultural divisions. We have ever tougher times ahead: and as well as the national powers to cope with them, we need more grace and dignity in this country's daily dealings, to lubricate the fine gears of cooperation.
So many times in these weeks, as the party-political biliousness inflates to maximum size, I remember Brecht's caution to all radicals and activists in his great poem, 'To Those Born Later':
Hatred, even of meanness,
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.
Having said that, I enjoyed the SNP's generally positive campaign. If you know anything of the culture around their election machine, you'll know that there are cadres of extremely capable and idealistic young Scots involved. They're very much of the Net Generation, some of them returnees from plum jobs overseas. And they are desperate to apply their expertise and passion to the benefit of this country. You meet them, and it's what you've always hoped for, as a supporter of Scottish independence: that the brightest and best would apply themselves to progressing their country. I hope they get their result.
And as those who read these columns might have gathered, I also like the Scottish Greens. In terms of both the cautionary case of a worsening climate, and the positive case for a new, low-carbon economy and lifestyle, the popular consciousness is ready, and their time has come. I only hope - as I've been trying to suggest in the heady uplands of Scottish think-blogs - that if the "independence majority" of SNP/Green seats appears, both sides can graciously (that word again) see the opportunity for a real moment of transformation in Scottish society, requiring proper negotiation on both sides.
As for the Lib-Dems, Scottish Conservatives and Scottish Labour...Well, I hope that even they might eventually see that a Scotland whose macro-powers are pulled ever higher up the ratchet will give them an opportunity to let their ideologies and traditions flourish.
Vote early, fellow Scots. And vote hopefully.
