By Pat Kane. First published on SEPTEMBER 1ST, 2018
FOR long-term America-watchers like me – often stranded between love of, and frustration with, the whole inferno – it is a strange thrill to see the US grapple with the idea of an “American socialism”.
What could possibly have triggered such a weird, indeed un-American activity? Well, perhaps the election of some out-and-out American socialists.
By Pat Kane. First published on MAY 13TH, 2017
‘MARXIST’ is an old scare word – but does it really work any more? I guess we’re about to find out, in the remaining few weeks of this General Election campaign. The mildest of positive responses from Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and his deputy John McDonnell, answering leading questions on whether they were followers of the writings of Karl Marx, are doubtless now being fed into the Tories’ message machines. Expect a lurid meme splurting on to your social media feed some time before June 8.
Continue reading "PK column in The National: Reading of Marx isn't suspicious ... it's essential" »
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).
I was delighted to be asked to present one of the Stevenson Lectures on Citizenship at Glasgow University. The lecture text is below - and I'm assured there will be a YouTube video of the event available, which I will embed here. We had a near-full house of about 250, and I fielded a stream of excellent questions. If you attended the event, or not, all questions welcomed below in comments.
Stevenson Lecture on Citizenship
Scotland After Yes: A New State Facing a Challenging Century
Pat Kane
March 19, 2014
What will Scotland be like after a Yes vote in the independence referendum? Tonight I’m going to give myself the opportunity to imagine that in some detail. My conceit is that I will use three obviously significant dates of Scotland After Yes, and one date of particular significance to me, to structure my lecture.
19th September 2014 - the day after a yes vote
In order to begin to imagine what it will be like - and more importantly feel like - the day after a Yes vote, I want to put this referendum in the context of previous constitutional referenda in Scotland.
1979: There was a numerical majority for a Scottish Assembly, 51.6% of votes cast for Yes, 48.4% for No. But George Cunningham (Scots born but a Labour MP for islington) and his "40% rule" prescribed a 40% majority of the total electorate voting Yes, than just a simple majority. Falling short ensured there would be no Scottish Assembly, no buffer or alternative source of power to the subsequent decades of Thatcherism. How different history would have been…
1997: A two-question referendum: “I agree/do not agree there should be a Scottish parliament”, and “I agree/do not agree that it should have tax-varying powers”. Again, this is an odd referendum in its formulation - given that the Scottish parliament has rarely used its tax-varying powers. But there was a resounding Yes to the first, and slightly less but still solid majority to the second. (It’s worth noting that if the current Scottish Government (SG) had their way, we’d be facing another two question vote in Sept: One, do you want Scotland to have more powers? Two, do you think those powers should be for independence, or devo-max/enhanced devolution?)
2014: Conceding their desire for a third question to the UK government, in order to get a legally watertight referendum result, the SG signed Edinburgh Agreement for the simplest possible referendum Q: Should Scotland be an independent country? Yes/No.
This IS a binary choice - indeed, a dramatic choice. A No to independence means that for a generation (15-20 years), the spectre of Scotland as a possible nation-state will not haunt either Holyrood or Westminster. Scottish power will still, essentially, be power devolved from Westminster - any changes in our status must pass through the political process in London.
A Yes to independence means that, for the forseeable future (unless we do a Crimea), all of Scotland’s resources - human, institutional and natural - will come under the full powers of an Scottish democratic nation-state. We, the people, the citizens, will have taken full responsibility for the direction and fate of our country.
And that’s what we’ll realise when we look blearily in the mirror, either painfully hung-over or not having slept at all, on the morning (maybe early afternoon) of September 19th, 2014. We will have stretched ourselves for a goal that looked achievable and plausible. And we will have believed that we were capable, that we possessed the strengths and the talents, to reach that goal.
This is the second blog (first here) exploring the work of the late Scots nationalist intellectual Stephen Maxwell, based on his two posthumous works available on Luath Press, and originally commissioned by Bella Caledonia. This blog looks at Maxwell's critique of the default social-democracy of the SNP (coming from the left!), and concludes with some pointers towards campaigning tactics in 2014.
Revolution of Rising Expectations
Although he used language with the lapidary ease of a don, Stephen Maxwell could also coin some very useful one-liners. Take this one on nationalism’s Janus-faced approach to history: “It puts the past to work for the future”. Or, as he predictably glosses, “It translated a passive sense of ‘organic community’ into an urgent populist nationalism which mobilised popular energies in readiness for the ordeal of industrialisation under local leadership.”
One could easily take that last sentence, replace “industrialisation” with “globalisation” and “environmental crisis”, and it would neatly encapsulate the SNP’s basic (and successful) political strategy for the last decade or so. In both of Stephen Maxwell’s posthumous books, the last thing one can detect in his head or heart is an “urgent populist nationalism”.
But what other ideology than an “urgent populist nationalism” (our current version could be “Team Scotland for a prosperous, fairer nation”) is going to “mobilise popular energies” enough for a Yes vote? And bring about an independence which represents local “readiness” for the global “ordeal” of the 21st century?
Stephen’s answer to both these questions was clear, as represented in the title of his latest posthumous book: a “left-wing nationalism”. Yet that’s a clear challenge to a Scottish left which still remains fastidious about any political appeal to nationality.
Tom Nairn – as credible a figure as could be imagined, in terms of left credentials – contributes an introduction to Maxwell’s new book, which restates as neatly as possible his global take on the effectiveness of nationalism. Old-style nationalism was a creation of 18th-to-20th century industrialisation, which involved a “competitive and militarised transformation” of societies. This forced nations to over-intensify their sense of difference – to the point of “ethnicity” – as a means of shoring up their collective resources, faced with the juggernaut of modernity.
But post-Cold-War, we are facing a ramifying globalisation – a matrix of trade and communication which welcomes cultural difference, as both market opportunity and engagement strategy. Scotland’s “belated” nationalism, suggests Nairn, “may be intertwined with the novel, the onset of a new age.” What Nairn says Maxwell taught him was that “nationality can’t be glossed over or occluded. It has to be incorporated into the contemporary, forward-looking mode of sociality.”
In short: as a national community on a planet of networks, perhaps we can relax about being motivated by patriotism. Nationality becomes high-level “content” for the communication channels – which determine our prosperity as much as our manufactures or services. And the more attractive and interesting the national content, the greater the prospects.
Do we on the Scottish left – building our post-Crash model of “Common Weal” socio-economics, more productive and more participatory – think we have a “contemporary, forward-looking mode of sociality”? I’m sure we do. So are we prepared both to forge it in the context of a new Scottish nation-state, and also to proclaim it as an element of our attractive modernity, in a world of soft power and cultural diplomacy?
Should left, indy-friendly progressives be as prepared for global success – being praised for our efforts, even emulated – as much as we feel we are defensively building an ark, to weather the storms of globalisation?
Beyond Social Democracy
We need to tap into the quiet, deep-running confidence about the innovative potential of Scottish independence that Stephen Maxwell displays throughout his work. This is nowhere more evident than where he talks about what lies “beyond” social democracy, which he defines in Left-Wing Nationalism as “political liberalism, the mixed economy, the welfare state, Keynesian economics and a belief in equality”.
Of course, it would be difficult to expect such a vision to remain consistent, over nearly four decades of socio-economic development. Maxwell’s 1976 (and pre-Thatcherite) essay “Beyond Social Democracy” is to some degree a fascinating museum piece.
What a lost world – where workers’ mutuals and cooperatives, backed by state banks, operating above the level of a guaranteed income, supported by a vigorous people’s media, is the desired alternative to the “looming corporatist state”, run by a compact of trade-unions/business/government!
Yet Maxwell’s antennae quiver with great sensitivity to coming changes. That neo-liberalism was taking hold in the dying days of the Labour regime is proven by Denis Healey’s belief, reported by Stephen in the late ‘70s, that “the present range of inequalities of income, and the even greater differences in standards of living, gives an inadequate incentive to the middle class”.
We may currently fret about our insufficient safeguards on loose finance and money supply, even after a mighty systemic crash. We might also advocate for a change in Scottish company regulation that, post-Grangemouth, gives workers a strong voice in company policy.
Yet from the ‘70s, Maxwell has been making the case for an “economic decentralisation” which would make Scottish society resilient in the face of both challenges. An economy with a larger number of enterprises with much greater workers’ control might not only be good for the soul, suggests Stephen, but also increase the worker’s sense of responsibility for overall economic performance. He is worth quoting at length:
The case for employee sovereignty has recently been advocated as part of a strategy to restore to the market the central role in the allocation of resources denied it by social democratic economic management. In this strategy, democratically organised units of production would compete for markets and investment in an economy in which the expansion of the money supply would be as large as – and no larger than – the growth in productive capacity warranted. Increases in money wages would not automatically be covered by inflationary increases in the money supply as the politically expedient short-term alternative to unemployment, and workers’ control and ownership would impose a new sense of economic responsibility on the labour force.
As an alternative to the looming corporate state this picture of employee and consumer sovereignty has its attractions. But it assumes that the centralised bargaining power of the trade unions would be broken up by the spread of dispersed centres of employee control and that elected government would withstand the inevitable electoral pressures to accommodate their economic policies to premature or excessive demands for sectional increases in living standards. Both these assumptions are problematic. Whatever new economic policy options decentralisation of industrial control might uncover, it should be pursued in an independent Scotland in the first instance with the aim of limiting the growth of state power.
There’s some fulsome irony here, in a column written a few years before 1979. The words “employee and consumer sovereignty” would have a different resonance after Thatcher – meaning an assault on unions, a “share-holding democracy”, the mall-ification and credit-indebtedness of Britain. It’s also not difficult to sense Stephen’s disdain for union barons as themselves a “sectional interest” (he elsewhere makes an acute distinction between “socialism” and “Labourism”).
Yet after the meltdown of our elites, of all kinds, since 2008, it feels independence could mean returning to Maxwell’s not-travelled, or perhaps blocked-off, fork in the policy road. That is, a civil empowerment, or “social republic”, which locates real power much further down the line than the “complacent” (another favourite word) traditions of Scottish governance.
His sense of the necessary balancing-act of a future-ready politics is extremely consistent through the years. In the Donaldson Lecture at the SNP’s 2007 party conference, he sets out a thumbnail of the policy ambitions of independence. “The development of a bespoke version of social democracy, balancing a strong national framework for economic development and social welfare, with civil empowerment and the decentralisation of the management of public services is Scotland’s best hope for the future.”
The second element of the balance is as important as the first. In 1976, we read Maxwell’s warning about two of the limitations of the social democracy of his time. It has “failed to seek new forms of democratic community to moderate the rivalries of competing sectional interests”. And it has allowed “a concept of politics as a manipulative exercise, undertaken to create and maintain a compliant consensus, to smother the radical ideal of politics as a central activity in a socially responsible arid vigorously self-critical culture.”
It’s perhaps no surprise that Maxwell, who proved too unbiddable to even make it past the SNP candidates’ selection panels for the Scottish parliament, instead immersed himself in policy and advocacy for Scotland’s voluntary sector – staying with those who freely acted for others with care and engagement, not waiting for permission from “the managers of public services”. Nor is it surprising that he expresses a very early admiration (1991) for the Scottish Green Party, exerting an “influence on Scottish debate out of all proportion to its numbers.”
Getting to Yes (via Stephen Maxwell)
I presume Stephen would have agreed with the essentially community-based strategy adopted by YesScotland to ensure a Yes vote. Engage clearly and regularly with the third of those who would consistently vote for independence under whatever economic or political weather. Invite and prepare them to become active evangelists for a Yes vote in their families, communities, playspaces and workplace. And if they can each only convert one other person, the independence majority will be solidly achieved.
Yet many questions are begged here. How many of that third could we reasonably expect to be evangelists and converters? How many of them, indeed, might regard politics in this way – as their “central activity in a socially responsible and vigorously self-critical culture”? As I have commented elsewhere the Yes campaign(s) should see themselves as involved in the revitalisation of citizenship itself. And as many recent polls have noted, the more that people engage with the arguments, the more likely they are to vote Yes.
Yet is this citizenship drive too little, too late, and headed in the right direction? Other than their creative and artistic fraction, and a decent handful of maverick entrepreneurs, we can just about give up on the Scottish middle-classes. (Hugh Pennington’s dreadful inferiorism about the science-research funding ambitions of an independent Scotland is only the latest proof of that.) So it would seem that working-class voters – or that 70% of Scots on or below median wage – hold the key to a Yes vote.
Maxwell is ambivalent about the working-class’s potential to drive Scotland to independence. On the one hand, he criticises Tom Nairn for rendering the working class “in the role of Cinderella waiting for the kiss of a bourgeois intellectual Prince Charming to arouse its populist nationalist energies…The possibility that the Scottish working class as a component of an advanced “historic nation” might have possessed a concept of political nationalism along with sentimental nationalism seems not to have been considered.”
Yet reviewing a biography of Keir Hardie, he agrees with Hardie’s belief that “socialism was more likely to be built by an economically confident working class than by a crushed and demoralised proletariat”. And Maxwell is very alive to what he calls the “most persistent theme” of a “psychology of defensiveness” in the Scottish working-class – deeply scarred by the convulsions of war and industry since the late 19th century, and which thus came to “identify the Labour Party as its natural vehicle”.
Yet Maxwell’s injunction from his 1981 essay “Left-wing Nationalism” – the one that got him thrown out of the SNP, along with Alex Salmond – rings hugely true today. A case for independence that “concentrates on the promise of economic growth, while ignoring the divisive issue of how the fruits of growth are to be distributed, will never win the trust of the largest block of Scottish voters, the urban working class.”
So, from diving into Stephen’s forty years of writing on independence, the component parts of a winning Yes coalition would seem to be obvious.
For the SNP, who have brought us to this pass by means of their performance in government, there should be a core commitment: a relentless focus on gaining “trust” among the urban working-class in Scotland. A trust that independence implies both the defence of universal public services, and also a clear vista of economic opportunities, with some kind of targets or datelines involved.
Combined together, this will send the message that a Yes vote is a constructive, not a destructive act – an important message to send to a Scottish working-class that (as Maxwell’s work shows) have had quite enough destruction inflicted upon them.
Those previously mentioned fractions of the business and managerial class who have shaken off the coils of Scottish bourgeois turpitude should harness themselves to this purpose – that is, the shoring-up of working-class confidence in the future prosperity of an independent Scotland.
The face they should turn towards a future Scottish state is one of friendliness and constructiveness – able to cope with its social-democratic possibilities for stronger regulation between capital and labour (Jim Mather’s endorsement of Common Weal is a clear precedent – and Common Weal, as my last column suggested, could do some useful bridge-building here). The business bourgeoisie must be partners with Scottish workers, and the Scottish government, and help foment that “revolution of rising expectations” that Maxwell had so long anticipated.
For all independence supporters, but particularly non-SNP-aligned ones, whether members of other political parties or none, the focus of activity should be on community advocacy – passionate, creative, sustained, persistent advocacy. We have to be friendly, indefatigable, loving pests to those around us. Our energy and enthusiasm for independence, if it taps into the same kind of steady confidence demonstrated by Maxwell, will be contagious and inspirational.
The fluency and imagination of the “artists and creatives” that have peeled off from the Scottish bourgeoisie (mixing prole-bohemians and bourgeois-bohemians together, no doubt) should be deployed in community halls and spaces the length and breadth of Scotland. Time is short – but we surely have enough tools in the inspirational tool-box to amplify and energise the solid mobilising work that has been going on among YesScotland, National Collective, RIC, Say So Scotland, and others.
Maxwell knew how radical his own ideas were – but, as usual, he was very well armed for his critics. We should not, he counselled, “underestimate the extent to which nationalism – by publicising old ideals and proclaiming new standards, by accelerating the rate of social and economic change and by uniting different sectional groups behind a common aim – can open up new political perspectives”.
Indeed we should not. This referendum is there to be won for independence – and for that steady burn of democratic excitement which it will bring to our lives. Stephen Maxwell did not live to see it. But we will, and soon.
One of the most energetic and original independence campaign organisations to arise is the Radical Independence Campaign, who are organised by the International Socialist Group. I did an interview with one of their members, in the run up to their wildly successful conference this year. Very much sums up my position going forward into this final 8 months of campaigning.
Building “Radical Scotland”: An Interview with Pat Kane
By Kezia Kinder (International Socialist Group)
Published 3rd November, 2013 (ISG website version here)
Pat Kane has been active on the Scottish left for thirty years. Within that time he has been a lead singer, journalist, campaigner, rector, radio presenter, author and academic. Now, Pat is on the advisory board for Yes Scotland as we enter the final year until the referendum. I asked Pat about his thoughts on the referendum so far, his hopes for the Scottish left in the future and how his ideas and Scotland’s ideas have changed over the past three decades.
As an advocate of Scottish independence we begin by asking whether he thinks we’ll win next year’s referendum:
Yes, I do. I think the essential case for independence – not just in terms of Scotland’s viability, but in terms of the principle of completing the powers of the Scottish Parliament – is inarguable.”
What do you think of the independence debate so far? While there have been some moments of inspiration, it’s not how you imagined it, is it!?
No, actually, it is quite as I imagined it!
I don’t think Scotland is like Catalonia – we aren’t facing an implacable foe, tainted with dictatorship, who denigrates our language and culture. We are a very well-developed, English-speaking nation that can lay claim to being one of the birthplaces of modernity itself, through the Scottish Enlightenment. So I always thought that the debate would be factual, steady, discursive. The passion will build on the basis of a dour Scots rationality working its way through to a settled conclusion.”
The debate so far has been very much dominated on the pro-independence side by Alex Salmond and the SNP. So are alternative, more radical voices beginning to permeate through to the public at large?
I thought the recent Panelbase/Wings Over Scotland poll was completely fascinating on this. They identified that don’t-know voters are a bit more lefty, green-supporting and republican than the average Scot. But some of the other “social” questions were a combination of comforting and alarming – majorities for a council tax freeze, EU membership, a written Constitution, and a publicly owned rail system: and majorities against Trident, bedroom tax, fracking, and Page 3. But also majorities for NATO membership, retention of monarchy, harsher workfare, the death penalty, nuclear power stations – and majorities against minimum alcohol pricing, votes for prisoners, and a compelled 50/50 gender balance for MSPs.
I’ve been reading a lot of Stephen Maxwell’s writing in the last few weeks – and he counsels that “left-wing types should be patient”, in terms of the existing support for the kind of “radical democracy” (as opposed to social democracy) he asks for. The historical legacy of Scotland in the Union – a querulous middle-class compromised and unable to lead in a progressive direction, a self-defensive working class battered by war, industrialisation and de-industrialisation – means that we have to fan the flames of radicalism in Scotland carefully and sustainably.
The SNP are an alliance of interests across the ideological spectrum, always have been, always will be – but the necessary fact for the left in Scotland is that they, and not an alliance of pro-indy parties (which would have been my desired option), are the ones in the electoral position to bring about independence. I think they have to wisdom to know that they are the midwives to a new Scotland, and that they will – and should not – own the entire result. That’s why entities like Yes Scotland, RIC [the Radical Independence Campaign] and Common Weal are so important. They articulate the basic principle of full powers, and raising ambitions for what we could do with them, in a non/all-party space – which, in all good faith, we cannot expect a political party like the SNP to do effectively on its own. It might be a temporary alliance between the SNP and the left in Scotland, to bring about a Yes vote – but what it will enable is a permanent change in the life of this country.”
The Radical Independence Conference will take place on 23rd of this month – what are your hopes for the conference and will you be there?
I’m afraid I am out touring with Hue And Cry throughout England at that point, so I can’t be there. My hope is that people talk to each other, find strength and optimism in each other, and that there are more events where we sit down and work through the detail of better institutions, legislations and practices that we can campaign for in an independent Scotland. You should give yourself the realistically-utopian chance to imagine the first 5-10 years of an independent Scotland very concretely.”
You’ve mentioned on twitter your hopes for a new party post-referendum of ‘social democrats and democratic socialists’. Can you elaborate on this for us?
As the 80′s magazine used to say, I think there is a “Radical Scotland” that should begin to look at itself – across left-greens in the existing parties (SNP, Labour, Green, SSP, maybe even some Lib-Dems), the labour movement, voluntary groups, NGOs, environmentalists, etc. – and ask whether there is a clear and common platform, to the left of where an SNP election manifesto might be for the first Holyrood elections under indy in 2016, that it could campaign on. Similar to the Front De Gauche in France at the last election.
The Reid Foundation’s Common Weal project might be the policy basis of that. But I think, when we get a Yes vote, there will be a lot of bewildered Unionist party members – particularly in the Labour party/movement – who will find it cognitively dissonant to stay within their party structures, so virulently will they have argued against the new reality. I think they need to be provided with a home. This might also apply to those within the SNP who didn’t vote for NATO membership, and who might see it as incredibly important to raise a voice for neutrality or distance from that Alliance, now that independence is a reality.”
So, what are your hopes for the Scottish Left in the future, and do you think there are differences between the Scottish Left and the English or “British” Left?
As above, I think we need to be ready for some fundamental realignments post-indy. I think the first target for the Scottish Left under indy is to form themselves as a decisive bloc of seats in the Scottish Parliament of 2016. Common Weal may well be capacious enough for people to sign up to even from their existing party affiliations – let’s see. But I think it is very important for those Maxwellian “social democrats and democratic socialists” to give themselves the chance to make their voices clearly heard, for the first time, in a Scottish political context worthy of their idealism and energy.
I think there will always be a “Left of these Islands” – I am myself a member of Compass, the Labour-aligned but pluralist group based in London, whose policy agenda I very much agree with, in a Scottish context or not. But I do think Scottish independence is the radical act required not just to forge a better society in Scotland, but to be the shock event that compels fundamental changes on the centre-left in England. An indy Scotland could allow Miliband, for example, to go into the 2015 General Election arguing that Trident should be cancelled (as the UK could not afford the costs of relocation), in alliance with the Lib-Dems on a properly proportional electoral system for rUK, perhaps proposing a new, post-Lords Second Chamber (founded on regional representation) located in the North of England. I’m not that hopeful… but I do believe Scotland should lead by example.
You’ve written a lot on culture – how do you feel working class culture is different to that of the middle class? And how should we get a left-wing message across to working class people in a way that relates directly to them?
Stephen Maxwell in his new book The Case For Left-Wing Nationalism has a very useful definition of middle class: “The term middle class is used only to describe those members of society who make their living through utilising significant accumulated assets, whether in the form of education, training or financial capital”. The point being that we have to spread out the possibility of “accumulating significant assets” throughout the entire Scottish population. In that sense the only difference between working-class and middle-class in Scotland is an asymmetry of resources and power. Again I think Common Weal is right on the mark when it points out just how poorly remunerated most Scots are in their work – 70% of the country on median income. We need a combination of a targeted industrial and service planning strategy, growing certain areas of the economy – sustainable energy/engineering and retrofitted infrastructure, food, drink and tourism, care and health, small high-skill businesses and cooperatives of all kinds – that will provide high-skill and high-paid jobs to the majority. We need to say to working-class Scots that independence allows us to make clear choices, to shift national resources towards the majority rather than the minority – and to keep pointing to our European and Nordic neighbours as proof that it can be done, without old-style nervousness about “tax rises” short-circuiting people’s attention spans.
Working in journalism and the media, Pat began to explore the idea of the “Play Ethic”, writing a book on the subject published in 2006. We asked him to explain the concept of the Play Ethic a little more…
Max Weber once wrote about “The Protestant (Work) Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” – ie, the set of attitudes about duty, routine, self-discipline, and commitment to labour (whatever the job) that kept capitalism going. I would rewrite that now as “The Play Ethic and the Spirit of Informationalism” – ie, the centrality of creativity, inventiveness, passion and optimism to the information-and-service driven economies of today. The work ethic had its radical potential: the “dignity” of labour demanded its due in terms of better working conditions, and more welfare to sustain a working life. But I think the play ethic also has its radical potential. True “creativity” cannot be commanded or compelled – you have to let people have genuine zones of autonomy and secured freedom in their lives, for great ideas to naturally come through. So the politics of the play ethic is very much into shorter working weeks, guaranteed social incomes, fabulous public facilities – the collectively-constructive “ground of play” that will allow human creativity to flourish.
We need as much ingenuity for our challenges going ahead as we can generate. In terms of Scotland, I think we come at this through education – we’ve just launched a brilliant Play Strategy, and the Curriculum for Excellence is pointing towards letting both pupils and teachers co-create their learning, rather than have their lives testing out of them. My campaign with the Play Ethic has been to get adults to realise they have to build grown-up institutions with zones of creativity in them, not just keep it for the best schooling.”
You’ve been politically active in Scotland for thirty years – how do you think Scotland’s political identity has changed over that time, and how have your own political ideas changed with it?
Yeah, thanks for reminding me Kezia, thirty years…
I think the essential shift has been a growing confidence about Scottish identity, a growing sense of the acute limitations of being governed purely from Westminster, and a period where we saw that even limited powers of self-government allowed us to do progressive stuff, as well as the basic stuff. I don’t think one can underestimate how insecure Scots have been about their own capacities and status for so many decades, even centuries. I am a green-left guy, and I have high ideals for an independent Scotland. But I think the basic achievement of independence will be to make Scots feel like full citizens of their polity, for the first time ever – willing and able to take full responsibility for the shaping of the nation they have decided to live, love, create and work in. I think that final step forwards (and upwards) will have massive psychological consequences for Scotland. We are a lucky country in terms of human and natural resources – but that could just be the platform for real leadership in the world, towards justice and equality. That was my dream for Scotland 30 years ago – and it’s the same one today.
This was a piece that Bella Caledonia asked me to write after news of my membership of Labour for Independence seems to cause some consternation in the media, with it being taken as evidence of SNP front activity. I explain my engagement with LFI below, but suffice it to say that I've taken this organisation at face value - a bunch of disillusioned Labour supporters who want to encourage their party to embrace the possibilities of independence. They're not the only ones out there - see the bright young intellectuals around the blog Mair Nor A Roch Wind for more thinking about a Labour that does not equate "solidarity" and "Unionism". And the Reid Foundation's Common Weal project is also an attempt to engage labour movement thinking with the opportunity of a Yes vote.
Independents For Labour
By Pat Kane, for Bella Caledonia (published version here)
It was a bright and optimistic Saturday morning this last weekend, and I decided I wanted to attend Labour for Independence’s policy conference. The website said I could if I joined the organization. I strolled up to the venue (the STUC building in Glasgow’s Woodlands Road), filled in my form, and paid my ten pounds.
I’m not a member of the Labour Party – but they asked me was I a member of any other party? I’m not, no. So, in I went, to listen to my colleague on the board of the Reid Foundation, Robin McAlpine, expound inspirationally on his “Common Weal” project. This is an attempt to create a Nordic-style policy platform for Scotland – worth attempting under any conditions, but only fully realisable under independence – that could bring together social-democrats (and democratic socialists) from all parties and bodies in Scotland.
At lunch break, I shared a nice glass of diet Coke with some interesting new comrades in the Schoolhouse bar next door, and then sauntered off into the Glaswegian sun. A rare, non-family weekend indulgence, its rarity only proving Oscar Wilde’s dictum about the problem with socialism being “that it takes up too many evenings”. And also, to me, an example of the civic and political innovation that we hoped would be unleashed by the referendum campaign.
But in the days since, social media has thrummed with outrage, that people like me – out-and-out independence supporters, with a history of supporting the main party advocating that, the SNP – could get away with associating myself with the red rose and capital-L of “Labour”, in any way, shape or form.It’s come to a head with Scotland on Sunday columnist Euan McColm’s piece in Think Scotland today, which tries to demonstrate that the group Labour for Independence is a shady “front” organization for the SNP, Yes Scotland, or other independence-supporting entities. Here’s the nub of his charge:
Voters who believe Grogan [Allan Grogan, founder of LFI] and his acolytes represents a real movement for independence within Labour ranks are being conned. From the people in its publicity shots to the activists leafleting “like a boss”, Labour for Independence is kept alive by Scottish nationalists. The impression of momentum is down to the involvement of people such as an SNP Minister’s bag carrier, and the support of senior Yes Scotland officials… Labour for Independence is a sham, a tawdry little con in which some of the party’s most bitter rivals are complicit.
I’m sure Allan and his “acolytes” can answer for themselves about the organisation they’ve founded. And in terms of McColm’s photographic evidence of SNP members seeming to pretend to be LFI activists – again, those individuals can no doubt speak for themselves. Certainly, from the perspective and experience of being an advisory board member of YesScotland, I’ve gotten used to being in promiscuous ideological environments – Green party MSPs talking to property developers, leisure entrepreneurs talking to Scottish Socialists, artists as controllable as “unguided missiles” blethering with the Deputy Minister.
The democratic principle and clarity of a campaign for a Yes vote brings many types, actors – and parties – together in the same activist process (as does, of course, the No campaign). Yes Scotland as its most idealistic – and this is a fault to some – says that a Yes vote kick-starts a transformed political culture in Scotland. We become a place where all existing political allegiances have to figure out what it would be like to seek their “good societies” under the full powers of a nation-state. This should be an exciting, challenging and fluid moment.
So it doesn’t automatically surprise me that SNP members and activists would want to try out – maybe just to see what it feels like – a “Labour” identity, in the course of Yes campaigning. After many years of disillusion, even rage, at the Labour party in Scotland – and consequently, support for an SNP who make a better argument for universalism and social justice than they did – I guess that’s what I flirted with last Saturday morning.As I tweeted over the last couple of days, I have a lot of form with Labour – as movement, and as party. My first two Westminster votes were for Labour, in 1983 and 1987 (you may remember a certain song…). I came into Scottish activism in 1988 via Jim Sillars’s book Scotland: A Case for Optimism, an argument for “independence in Europe” that was driven by his analysis of the failures of the Scottish Labour Party he founded in the late seventies.
With Hue And Cry, we were involved with STUC-inspired events like the Day For Scotland, or protests against Caterpillar or Ravenscraig closures. Yes, it’s true, a good lump of the current SNP Cabinet were able to get this particular music-monkey elected as the SNP candidate for Glasgow University Rector (beating a great hero of mine, Tony Benn). But this didn’t preclude me from being involved in the post-1992 cross-party movement Scotland United, occupying mineral-water-sprinkled rooms with the likes of John McAllion, Dennis Canavan, Bill Speirs, Campbell Christie, George Galloway, and many others.
I’ve always been genuinely fascinated by the culture of ideas around Labour. I spoke at events organised by, and wrote articles for, Marxism Today – in which thinkers like Stuart Hall and Eric Hobsbaum were vital beacons of hope and critique in pretty grim times. MT’s leading lights – Martin Jacques and Geoff Mulgan – developed their “New Times” analysis of Thatcherism into the prospectus for the think-tank Demos, which fed into New Labour. (Indeed I was an associate with Demos under its head Tom Bentley in the mid-2000s).
I’ve been friendly with Mulgan for over 25 years – from the time he tried to (unsuccessfully) recruit me into Red Wedge at the Town and Country Club in 1987, through a presentation on The Play Ethic I made to his team, when he was head of policy in Blair’s Cabinet Office in the early 2000s, until right now – where I’m working on a futures-conference with him for Nesta in London. I’ve spoken at a few conferences of the centre-left, all-party, but essentially Labour-oriented pressure group Compass (which I joined recently) – and have a London dinner-date with its founder Neal Lawson next week.
I recount all this (stifle your yawns) to prove only one point, which I’m sure many others could make as well. Namely this: it’s possible to be a supporter of Scottish independence over nearly three decades, and to find ways to express that politically and electorally, by voting for parties who support that end-point (and under Euro and Holyrood elections, more than one at the same time).
But it’s also possible, over the same period, to be interested in the analysis of culture, economics and society that the Labour tradition represents – and to wonder whether the best of that could flourish under independence.
Previously on Bella, I’ve tried to engage constructively with some of the ideas around One Nation Labour. I also think the shift to society being defined by values of “production” and “craft” than “lifestyle” and “consumption” – which people like Jon Cruddas, Maurice Glasman, and Jonathan Rutherford are exploring through the Labour Policy Review – is very interesting. Unfortunately, they’ve tangled it up with UKIP-inspired anxieties around immigration and welfare dependence.
This simply doesn’t play in Scottish civic nationality, where concepts like the “common weal” – to which all contribute their productions – can actually find genuine popular resonance.
I am speaking personally here, but it seems to me that organisations like the Reid Foundation, the Radical Independence Convention and Labour for Independence can all function as bridges – between the social-democratic/democratic-socialist practices and traditions one might bundle up as “Labour” (old, new, blue or yet-to-come), and the constitutional launch-pad of a Yes vote in the coming indy referendum.
As I wrote in my Thoughtland article in 2012 predicting a “Labour For Independence”, it would seem a real tragedy if the entirety of Labour in Scotland, party and movement, found itself entirely on the outside of history, come a Yes vote in September 2014.
In the period between that vote and the first parliamentary elections in 2016, will Labour members and representatives really be content to stagger around in the ruins of the Union, trying to flip their collective psyches from virulent opposition to constructive support? (If the recent polling resilience of the SNP is anything to go by, one can barely conceive of that party’s dominance in the post-Indy moment).
Or would it be best for some of the brothers and sisters to have thought and spoken clearly and publicly beforehand, about the kind of Labour Scotland they would want to see under independence? (The late Stephen Maxwell’s book Arguing for Independence could almost serve a therapeutic function here. I recommend as many comrades read it as possible).
There’s a lot of smart, personable, attractive people in the Labour movement, Scottish and UK – one of the reasons why I’ve always wanted to keep dipping into their culture and practices. But this sour tone of “fronts”, “conspiracies” and “shams” really has to wash away at some point. It’s not a huge deal that I, or any SNP-friendly type, is a member of LFI. But it is, I think, a hopeful sign that the best of Scotland’s talents and passions could be put in the service of independence.