Barbarism Begins at Home
Gerry Hassan
Bella Caledonia, 2 July 2024
Across the West politics are fractured, divisive, and raise more questions than answers. Biden vs. Trump; the authoritarian US Supreme Court extending Trump’s Presidential immunity; the march of the far-right in the French legislative assembly elections; the UK election and emptiness of the mainstream – a trend reflected by Andrew Hindmoor in Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000 as ‘the growth of modern miserabilism’ and as evidence that ‘the country is in decline and everything is getting worse.’
Everywhere the forces of the populist right are either baying at the gates of office, redefining the national debate – or already in national office in Italy, Hungary and Poland. There is the unseemly spectacle of Trump and his Republican advocates; Farage and the racism he has enabled and the shifting of French and German politics ever rightward and more.
Mainstream Western politics reacts in a now predictable pattern – acquiescence, appeasement, acceptance, followed by complete and utter capitulation. Biden’s enfeebled performance is the extreme manifestation of this phenomenon; Biden has personal limitations but the Democrats long ago forgot what they stand for and what kind of America they represent. Sound familiar? A similar picture is evident in the core of Starmer’s Labour; Sunak’s Tories; Swinney and the SNP; the German and French lefts and the once impressive Swedish Social Democrats.
The capture of political language by the right
How did we get to this sorry state? What can be done to challenge and change it? For a starter there is a need to recognise how major a debacle we are in across the West, UK and Scotland. This is now a political environment where political language, norms and values, have now become appropriated, distorted and debased by the forces of the populist right.
For example, academic Matt Goodwin, who made his reputation understanding the UKIP ‘revolt on the right’ before fully going native and embraced them, last week endorsed voting for Farage. In this intervention he laid out his prognosis on current UK politics, characterising it as shaped by a ‘social democratic consensus’ that Starmer’s Labour would push further to the left. It is as if the past 45 years, Thatcherism and neoliberalism never happened.
From a more right-wing vantage point Farage and Richard Tice regularly refer to Sunak and the Tories as ‘not Conservatives’, but instead ‘socialists’: the reasoning being that they supposedly favour ‘big spending’ and ‘a big state’.
A common thread underlying the above is the debasement of the terms ‘socialist’ and ‘social democrat’: the former of which was synonymous until the late 1970s with political transformation. This can be seen in the early years of devolution when Scotland was described as having ‘a social democratic consensus’ – seen by many of a New Labour persuasion (such as Wendy Alexander) as being a bad thing.
From a different political position post-2014 indyref a host of pro-independence supporters started to describe the SNP under Nicola Sturgeon as ‘democratic socialist’ and ‘socialist’ as they tried to describe the supposedly leftward shift of the party under her leadership. This has a commonality with the right-wing commentary above in it labels centrist politics as somehow ‘socialist’ – implying fantasy projection and incomprehension about what socialism is.
Understanding the rise and fall of neoliberalism
The rightward lurch of politics across developed capitalist societies has seen the rise, triumph and resulting crisis of right-wing thinking which has coalesced around neoliberalism. This partial settlement after its emergence in the late 1970s and early 1980s imploded in the 2008 banking crash and yet retained its vice-like grip with a zombie neoliberalism.
What once was social democracy has now been dragged rightwards to the extent that its progressive credentials can no longer be taken seriously. The crisis of neoliberalism has not aided the left – large parts of which are implicated in it – but empowered the forces of the virulent, populist right who have been able to present the parties of the centre-left and centre-right as ‘the establishment’ and themselves as insurgents and challengers.
The backdrop to this is the reconfiguration of capitalism, wealth and power from the late 1970s onward which has transformed societies and the fortunes of the super-rich and elite corporate class. This has not though, across four decades, been matched by a commensurate politics of critique and analysis of this changed set of dynamics and in particular the remaking of how we understand power and economics. At a theoretical level concepts of power still draw from notions from the 1970s and Steve Lukes’ seminal Power: A Radical Approach which has its roots in the managed, ordered capitalism of 1945-75 no longer with us.
There have been numerous attempts to analyse particular aspects such as Thomas Piketty on inequality or Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Sandel on aspects of freedom. But the failure to understand the shifting manifestations of power in all its aspects – economic, social, cultural, political – is manifest and comes at a cost. How can we challenge the existing order if we do not have accurate roadmaps for navigation?
Scotland’s social democracy, the SNP and people power
The same is true in spades in Scotland. Our much-cited social democracy would not pass the test as anything but centrist managerialism in the 1960s and 1970s. It could even be argued that this is too harsh on the high point of that era which delivered tangible things in the 1960s – house building, slum clearance, wider opportunities for the working classes, and social liberalisation (the last the responsibility of Westminster rather than Scottish politicians).
The SNP’s understanding of societal change and power has been as limited as any mainstream UK party. After winning office narrowly in 2007 the SNP rode a sea-change in attitudes in relation to party, government and Scotland which saw them win big in 2011 resulting in the ‘Big Bang’ of the 2014 indyref: a major moment in democratic engagement and mainstreaming of the idea of independence. But like all ‘Big Bangs’ the energy from the original point is slowly and inalterably petering out while still leaving an altered landscape.
Ten years after 2014 we can assess these big changes and their relationship with the SNP. Two observations. First, the sea-change which caused the SNP to win so impressively was only partly understood by the party. It won narrowly in 2007 at the fag-end of the Blair era as voters were desperate to call an end to Labour’s dominance in Scotland. Second, the explosion of democratic engagement which the indyref produced had long-term roots in how power and authority shifted in society, that I explored in my account of how we got to the referendum and its wider context: Caledonian Dreaming: The Quest for a Different Scotland.
The longer story of 2014 was the backdrop of the changing nature of power and authority that had once been associated with a liberal unionist establishment – and which like elsewhere in the West had declined as society became more pluralist, diverse and disputatious. However, this longer story was barely understood by the SNP who rode this wave with their own version of authority and modernity which barely reflected on the modern times that we live in.
If you think this too harsh there is a connection between the explosion of energy and DIY activism in the indyref and a similar, although smaller flowering of activism and energy when Rangers FC went into liquidation in 2012. The football authorities attempted the old classic stitch-up: a rap on the knuckles but business as usual. Football fans across the nation organised and rebelled, forcing their clubs to take a stand and as a result Rangers started life as a new club in the fourth tier.
Fast forward to the immediate aftermath of the indyref, when I made the above comparison between the reaction to Rangers and the DIY engagement in 2014 to one of the SNP’s senior strategists. He commented: ‘You aren’t talking about football, are you? You are talking about power.’
The point being that an influential SNP figure had never heard any comparison between the two or the indyref posed in that wider context as about a society where power and authority are in flux. It reveals that the SNP have been until recently beneficiaries of social changes that they have barely understood.
Aiding this incomprehension is the Albaesque wing of the independence movement. Alex Salmond was last week on manoeuvres giving interviews to The Independent and The National. In the first he admitted Alba had no chance of any impact in this UK election but laid great hope on the 2026 Scottish elections where he thought Alba could win 15% of the vote and 20 seats. This will not happen with Salmond’s dire poll ratings as one of the most unpopular politicians in Scotland and shows his degree of self-delusion and belief in himself as a great leader.
Bereft of strategy, independence is currently revisiting previous approaches already tried and failed. Salmond proposed 2026 as a de facto referendum whereby a pro-independence majority of seats would be a mandate for independence. He made the point that many countries have become independent without referendums citing Ireland: ‘The Irish Free State didn’t have a referendum to establish a free state – the election in 1918 was taken as the electorate mandate which justified the negotiations.’
This is a politics of going nowhere. Firstly, Scotland is not Ireland. The latter was brutalised in the union; Scotland has always been and still is part of the core state; Ireland was a victim of British imperialism; Scotland an active agent. Secondly, Ireland’s 1918 road to independence was hardly smooth and involved a bitter civil war. Thirdly, invoking 1918 and the post-First World War world to Scotland and 2024 just doesn’t cut it whether in relation to the UK or geo-politically.
The biggest objection to the above is more basic and home-grown. Scotland has created a precedent in how independence is progressed or not – a referendum – and this has consequences for pro and anti-independence forces. It is the necessary road for independence to progress and one that union forces have previously agreed to – making it more likely there can be a second one. Politics and legitimacy have consequences. The 2014 indyref saw two million people vote No on an 84.6% turnout; and this cannot be overturned by approximately one million voting SNP in a Scottish Parliament election.
Feeding the most partisan part of the base has not served independence well. Sturgeon engaged in a politics of tactical positioning for eight years post-2014; Salmond is trying to make himself relevant and talk himself into mattering. This puts barriers in the way of independence asking bigger questions about how it organises; how it thinks of the Scotland it wants to create; the timescales and horizons of its ambitions, and how it addresses legitimacy and the British state.
The corporate capture of the public sphere
The above takes place not only against a backdrop of a massive concentration of power, corporate influence and expansion of wealth in a very few hands but in relation to the shifting contours of the public sphere in the West.
Not only are we living through technological change and innovation; we are witnessing an information overload where once powerful gatekeepers and traditional platforms have weakened. Individual citizens are left to navigate noise, disputatious voices and fake news themselves hence the rise of conspiracy theories, disinformation and hate crimes and abuse.
This is the downside of what happens when we leave the terrain of managed capitalism where power, authority and elites still had clear anchor points. We are now in a dramatically different landscape where media, public discourse and the public sphere are being transformed. The latter has undergone an expansion whereby the reduced cost of entry means that anyone can blog or comment on social media but also a contradiction and concentration of power in ownership and control.
The tension between these two – the once-celebrated egalitarian democratisation of new media and technologies, and new gated communities of surveillance capitalism – is not a level-playing field with monies, resources and influence, sitting with the latter.
In Scotland the podcast environment is still not a particularly rich landscape. One initiative of note is the insider class, corporate sponsored Holyrood Sources run by Andy McIvor, Geoff Aberdein and Calum Macdonald. Their agenda is transparent: advocating a low-tax, business friendly, regulation light world – conducive to the clients who sponsor them and for whom they do public affairs work.
Regular sessions are male-only panels talking the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years posing this as some new insight in supposedly centre-left Scotland (or a couple of weeks ago six talking male heads and SNP Kate Forbes). Academic Ewan Gibbs observes of their emergence: ‘The success of the Holyrood Sources podcast in shaping debate in Scotland, particularly over fiscal and economic issues, makes me wonder why the centre-right has this outlet but the broadly defined left doesn’t?’
What happens when Labour wins?
The historian David Edgerton, author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation, has described one of the central dynamics within Labour as the hold of conservatism on the party historically and in present times, when it is purportedly a party of radical change.
Writing last week in The Guardian, he noted that Starmer’s Labour is morphing into ‘a new, competent, small-C conservative party’. Despite everything Starmer and Reeves have said, the idea that ‘Labour remains a progressive social democratic party hiding in plain sight is still in the air’ even when ‘Labour is telling the world otherwise.’
The official pronouncements of Labour are that it ‘believes in the sagacity of private capital and thinks it will unleash growth through financial orthodoxy and deregulation – exactly the policy not only of the past 14 years, but the past 40’ states Edgerton, concluding that ‘Like New Labour, it believes in the power of capitalism, whether entrepreneurs or financiers.’
Labour will soon win a historic victory and mandate that will offer them a once in a generation opportunity, and perhaps a last generational chance, to remake the British state and nature of the union.
To many in the independence camp this project is doomed to failure (and this may well be the likely outcome) but that does not mean that self-government should not be making common cause with those in the labour and trade union movement who see democratisation, decentralisation and detonating the last vestiges of the imperial centre as central to any radical politics, along with talking about power and political economy.
What passes for social democracy in Labour and the bourgeois progressive nationalism of the SNP are hardly adequate guides for the politics of the present and future. But we must engage with them while also nurturing dialogue and collaboration across left and radical currents across the UK, challenging the conservatives, centrist managerialists and corporate class apologists wherever we find them.
The stakes are enormous – a zombie capitalism with a capricious appetite, a planetary lifeforce crisis that mainstream politics cannot muster the confidence or insight to effectively challenge, while new technologies and AI reinforce the power dysfunctionality of a neo-feudal capitalism and populists of the right present themselves as the new insurgents and disrupters.
Welcome to the Britain of 2024 – Scotland’s electoral choice heading into 2026 while we pretend we are different; the new age of authoritarian anti-democracy in the US; the fraying French and German political systems and more. At least we now know what we always should have known about the bankrupt nature of social democracy and bourgeois nationalism, and the destructive nature of unrestrained capitalism which is more than prepared to devour all before it including the planet.
Talking of the present UK Tory Government Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy said: ‘There’s something about a certain class of individuals at the end of the Raj not really having an account of the future.’ This could just as easily be an indictment of the entire UK political class irrespective of party – and our devolution class in Scotland.
Political change starts by recognising the scale of crises humanity faces; the emptiness of mainstream politics; the onward march of the right and its vile politics; the corporate capture of the public sphere; and connecting these the absence of a vision of the future which lifts us collectively. That latter void – where there should be plans, programmes, stories, narratives – is what ultimately needs addressing in the UK and Scotland after this election as well as beyond into the next Scottish elections.
