Get Ready for the Age of Disruption Coming to Scotland!
Sunday National, December 29th 2024
Gerry Hassan
Politics everywhere across the West is shaped by failure, exhaustion and unpopularity in the mainstream – and increasingly by anger and rage amongst voters.
Both Scotland and the UK are no exception. Labour’s election victory with 34% of the vote was the smallest in history for a party winning an overall parliamentary majority. Since then it has been downhill all the way with a government showing a lack of sure-footedness and political acumen on issue after issue, and with no sense of how to communicate and chart a direction.
To many observers on left and right this is about the perfidy of Starmer and Labour. The former betrayed Corbyn and Corbynism and is thus a traitor to many on the left, while the hysterical nature of much of the right means that Starmer is regularly called “far left” and accused of advancing Corbynism. In truth Starmer’s problems come, as well as his own limitations, from deep-seated problems about the UK, its politics and state and from a bigger phenomenon seen across the West – specifically the crisis and retreat of the centre-left and nature of capitalism.
Scotland is in a different place. The current arc of politics saw a SNP period of unchecked dominance end in the 2024 Westminster election. This era was shaped by SNP repositioning and remaking itself in 2007, 2011 and the run-up to 2014, and the party has been living off this slow declining legacy to this year.
Labour’s victory in 2024 seemed to offer the prospect of a new alignment but it has not turned out that way. Scottish Labour’s poll ratings have crashed post-election. The party won this year without any strategic resetting by Anas Sarwar and senior figures; instead, it rode on the back of a “double change” environment by railing against the unpopularity of the Tories and SNP in office.
Some in the SNP now make the same mistake that Labour made before them: seeing the recent rise in support for the SNP as a validation of where things are. Rather SNP support currently is a product of the troubles and weaknesses of their opponents. Similarly, the rise in support for independence is a result of the failing, broken nature of UK politics; it does not mean that the serious work which has not been undertaken in the ten years since 2014 can continue to be ignored.
UK Politics and Government are Broken
To some people the ups and downs of party politics are all that matters. While they have consequences they also have to be seen in the context of a wider landscape of the state of Western politics, successive failures of governments, limitations of statecraft, the weakening social contract between authority and citizens, and the increasing frustration and anger of voters.
Firstly, UK politics and government are clearly dysfunctional, suffering from elite capture and not up to the huge challenges domestically and internationally. The difference between the moods of 1997 and 2024, the early days of Blair and Starmer, could not be further apart and reveal a UK where the judgement of most voters is that things no longer work and that the system is rigged and increasingly falling apart.
Secondly, the way that mainstream parties from Labour and Tories to the SNP describe and try to understand this situation only magnifies and deepens problems and disconnect. The language these parties use to describe society is revealing in its bankruptcy owing more to technocratic managerialism with talk of “levers” and “targets” without any understanding of deeper issues.
Thus, The Guardian’s usually astute economic correspondent Aditya Chakrabortty believes that Labour politicians should not use phrases such as “UK government is broken.” This is, he judges, from the Faragist playbook and only aids the right. However it just so happens to be true, and the question remains as to whether politicians like Starmer believe that UK government is “broken”; or whether this is the language of desperation.
The bigger takeaway is that the hollowed-out politics of the mainstream is giving the argument for change by default to right-wing populists and is one of the powerful tailwinds fuelling the Faragist right-wing insurgency.
Reform are speaking for a constituency which has been patronised, dismissed and too often ignored. They are both a product of the revolt that gave us Brexit and the failure of mainstream politics, as well as an indictment of the state of British society and its manifest unhappiness, insecurity and widespread pessimism about the future.
In the past few days Farage has claimed that Reform has surpassed the Tories in membership – reaching 131,712 members. Yet while this was amplified across all UK media Reform do not actually have any real members, still being a private company owned by Farage and Richard Tice who have 53% and 33% of shares respectively.
In Scotland Reform are making inroads, scoring double-digit poll ratings for the Scottish Parliament, winning shares of 13-18% in local by-elections, and in a recent Westminster poll being ahead of the Tories and only 5% behind Labour in second place.
Who speaks for the anti-establishment?
Scottish politics have for too long been a cosy affair particularly around the Scottish Parliament. New Scots Tory leader Russell Findlay recent laughable claim that his party were “the anti-establishment force” reeked of the same desperation as Starmer’s cited above. In this case, trying implausibly to adjust his pitch to prevailing winds and underlining the absence of any Scots Tory strategy post-devolution.
The Tory Party in Scotland historically has been a core part of the Scottish establishment. Devolution offered the Tories a rare opportunity to remake themselves, to challenge the conceits of the devolution class and question Scotland’s political establishment. None of which it has done in the past 25 years.
This for now leaves the road open to Reform and to a populist right-wing challenge. This would rail against Scotland’s soft cosy centre-left consensus and invoke a politics of lower taxes, deregulation, cutting back on quangos and public bodies, and taking a stand against “the nanny state” and “wokery.” There is undoubtedly a constituency for such a politics in Scotland.
More than this, is a need for a sweeping challenge to what on occasions is too often an insular, inward facing, self-congratulatory politics of Scotland. Why do too many people still think that politics of a vague, centrist social democracy and unreflective Scottish nationalism are adequate – given the state of our country? Across the Western world social democracy and progressive politics are in retreat – shorn of ambition, agency and a vision of a different future and Scotland is no different.
Similarly, Scottish nationalism with a small “n” has never been the property of one cause or constitutional option. And it is incapable of being the driving force for a politics of autonomy, let alone independence, and the future.
In such difficult times there needs to be in Scotland a harnessing of anger, rage and fury, as well as giving voice to those who feel powerless and helpless in the face of vested interests. We must look beyond hollowed out, compromised social democracy. This means talking about who and who does not have power; identifying which insider groups and interest have status and influence in Scotland and calling out who devolution and the Scottish Parliament really works for. Sadly after 25 years it does not, despite all the rhetoric, benefit those who most need its support, with those with the best lobbyists and public affairs advisers gaining the most.
We need to talk about Class
The past four and a half decades have seen an assault on the rights of labour across the West which has resulted in labour’s portion of UK wealth being at a post-war low. This is not a figure which is a product of the right’s usual litany of villains – immigrants, bloated public spending and over-bearing regulation. Rather it is a deliberate consequence of right-wing policy and dogma followed by successive UK governments of all persuasions.
The rising influence of the Global South has also increasingly provided a counterpoint to the dominant view of the West and its geopolitical interests. This can be seen across the world from the Middle East to Ukraine, Africa and South America. At the same time while the Global South 90% of the world’s labour force it accounts for only 21% of global income according to a major academic study. This is a world defined by grotesque inequalities and wealth and amplified by the open fawning of the billionaire tech class such as Elon Musk and Gulf State monies and investments.
This backdrop is one in which the parties of the centre-left across the West have increasingly abandoned talking about class and structural inequalities. This phenomenon was explicit in the era of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair when they evangelised on the merits of globalisation and free trade. This saw Clinton create the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of the US, Canada and Mexico which cut a swathe through US industrial jobs, inadvertently laying out the ground for Trump.
Joe Biden did try to reinstate policies focused on industrial jobs and regions and trade unions, but it was too little too late (although still streets ahead of Starmer and Labour). The dominant perspectives of the centre-left from the Clinton and Blair eras are still there across the West. Both produced books this year – Citizen: My Life After the White House (Clinton) and On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century (Blair) – which showed they had learnt nothing of the damage and consequences of their politics in office.
The consequences of abandoning class and working-class interests by Labour, the Democrats and centre-left parties across the West has been to allow the populist right to claim and weaponise this terrain of resentment and anger – a sentiment which will only escalate in the near-future.
Twin Peak Scotland: After Salmond and Sturgeon
Where does all this leave Scotland? The twin legacies of Salmond and Sturgeon still define today’s SNP and independence. Salmond remade the SNP into a successful party of government – and transformed independence. Sturgeon’s challenge was very different but while she kept the SNP winning elections this came at a rising cost. Increasingly the SNP hoarded power in a few select hands, had limited priorities and direction in government, and tragically showed an increasing and obvious contempt for those outside the inner circle whether in the party or country.
The SNP thus became a party of the political establishment and devolution – and the managed, manipulated semi-democracy which has run Scotland for decades. This was politics based on a lack of candour and honesty, of constantly pretending an indyref was just round the corner and at the same time unwilling to address the need for a strategic resetting of the independence cause and to discuss hard truths about choices (including why Yes lost in 2014) and the future.
The enduring legacy and consequences of Salmond and Sturgeon is still with us in the here and now. The SNP’s poll ratings after the 2024 election reverse are a product of dissatisfaction and disappointment, as well as growing anger at Labour, and are not on any measure an endorsement of the SNP. The Nationalists should not over-read their new-found popularity coming up for 18 years into office.
There is a danger in reading too much from short-term changes. Just as the Tories have willfully refused to reflect on why they were so decisively rejected by voters in the July election when the won the lowest vote in the party’s history, so the SNP must avoid making a similar response. The Tories rather than address why they won a mere 23.7% of the UK vote have taken succour in Labour’s mounting problems and skipped any post-election post-mortem believing that normal service and their return to office will happen: all aided by fear of a debate which provides too many hostages to fortune to Farage.
The SNP are in a similar trap. The party in the immediate aftermath of the election had endured a wake-up call. There were lots of bruises, pains and degree of anger. People knew that the 2024 reverse had been a long-time coming and that a new direction was needed. Tragically for the SNP the degree of Labour incompetence has allowed the usual voices of caution and conservatism to assert that all that is needed is to steady the ship. This is politics at its most superficial and short-term as a nervous leadership shores up their position.
A Different Vision of Independence
Independence is similarly in transition, and across large parts of pro-independence there is a sense of understandable pessimism. Too much of the debate is defined by black and white stances, as demonstrated in a recent Channel 4 News discussion with one elderly pro-union voice say that “an independence referendum was now off the cards and never going to happen” while a younger pro-independence campaigner insisted it was “inevitable.”
Such binary and unhelpful stances define too much of our politics. They aid a sense of powerlessness and a prevailing mood across the country of “learned helplessness” which only helps the status quo and those for whom devolved Scotland is working fine.
Independence has to stop believing its own self-serving hype while also not listening to doomsayers. A recent Believe in Scotland poll showing 66% support for independence if it promised a well-being economy and “a well-being pension” made waves but was close to meaningless. The survey was based on a leading question and ignores the hard work and lifting that independence has failed to do post-2024.
An independence of the future must break from the continuity and caution of the current SNP. It will need to address class, democracy – and the missing Scotland who have been disenfranchised and disempowered by truncated party politics and who briefly turned out and voted in the 2014 indyref. As well as these obvious defining issues any successful politics has to navigate generational divides and inequalities and the increasing gridlock which sees too many voters well into their thirties locked out of the housing and job markets. What would a politics and independence which took the concerns of Generation Z and younger seriously look like? We should at least ask the question.
None of this is easy. The spirit of the future Scotland is going to be defined by who can most successfully capture the need and desire for change, and cam challenge the cosy stitch-ups and closed shop that informs too much of the politics of devolved Scotland. In short this is about embracing the politics and mindsets of disruption, anger and discontent at the mainstream and state of our country and politics.
That perspective will not come from the present-day SNP. The party still lives in the shadows of Salmond and Swinney, and the caution of Swinney and the economic orthodoxies and social conservatism of Kate Forbes are hardly likely to offer any successful prospectus which speaks to the future.
Any new radical political agenda must deal directly the limits of 25 years of devolution. This has left a Scotland where health inequalities and the life expectancy of our poorest communities has barely moved and in places has got worse; where the opportunities for young bright working-class children has hardly changed and where for all the talk too much of Scotland’s public sector serves the interests of the affluent and middle classes both in employment and services. Meanwhile the reality of too much of public life is still of bitter discrimination on the grounds of class and status: look at the recent reports of the condescending attitudes working class students at Edinburgh University face from affluent, mostly English students and staff.
If Scottish self-government does not speak to this agenda, then the forces of the emboldened populist right will gain traction. It is easier for the forces of the irresponsible right to embrace disruption and rupture compared to those who call themselves centre-left, but this goes to the heart of what Scottish politics and independence is about.
For some independence is an abstract principle and moral calling with no further detail required, as an independent Scotland would be morally superior. This fails to understand that this outlook only speaks to and for a minority of Scotland and independence has to go beyond the principle to offer detail and a convincing story of a future country.
Another independence perspective represented by the SNP leadership and others sees statehood as a way of maintaining what they see as the essential decency of public life and institutions. Here independence is more about preservation than the restoration of the first perspective, with a major driving force getting out of the UK while it morally and politically bankrupts itself. One of the defining metaphors of this outlook is William McIlvanney’s idea of independence as a “lifeboat” leaving the “shipwreck” of the UK.
This perspective yearns for stability, order and compassion – clearly good qualities – but sees them as represented in the Britain of 1945-75 which UK Governments then turned their backs on and trashed. The problem with this view is that the managed capitalism of the immediate post-war era was based on an international global order of fixed currencies and negotiated capital flows which has long gone, abandoned by Nixon as long ago as 1971.
This leaves the need for a third road on independence to find its voice and place. It has to embrace radicalism, challenge power and represent communities in Scotland who have been neglected and too often forgotten. That politics cannot for now come from the SNP. Nor can it come from the Scottish Greens, Scottish Socialists or Alba. Which begs the question: who will dare to champion a different kind of Scotland, future and independence in the age of disruption?
Such a political terrain cannot be left to Farage, Reform and even more virulent right-wing forces of reaction, bigotry and racism. The politics of caution, conservatism and safety-first are not only inadequate; they have helped fan this right-wing revolt. These are increasingly volatile times and instead of sleepwalking into an even more dystopian future we are going to have to adapt to, and learn to, live more dangerously.
