Scotland: Centrism’s Bolthole?
Anyone driving through Ayrshire in the south-west of Scotland might encounter a stretch of the A719 known as the Electric Brae.* Here, an almost imperceptible gradient combines with certain features of the surrounding landscape to produce an optical illusion more widely known as a ‘gravity hill’. Kill the engine and leave off the brakes, and your car will begin to roll eerily uphill – or rather, will appear to do so as it actually trundles down to a watery terminus in the Firth of Clyde.
A similar confusion occurs when looking at the state of Scottish politics in 2020. Against the backdrop of Westminster’s ongoing catastrophe, the continued dominance of a Scottish National Party that proclaims its ‘social democratic’ values, speaks up for the rights of immigrants and opposes nuclear weapons suggests a near-magical national capacity for progress against powerful countervailing forces. Look closer, however, and gravity’s fatal pull begins to show.
In 2015, the SNP swept fifty-six of Scotland’s fifty-nine Westminster seats on a vaguely anti-austerity platform, drawing in huge numbers of Labour and Liberal Democrat voters as well as many of the new voters who had been politically activated by the 2014 independence campaign. This was seen by many left-wing independence supporters as a modest triumph for the left, rebounding from the British state’s 2014 referendum victory and clearing out the Liberal Democrats alongside a sclerotic and right-wing Scottish Labour establishment.
Since then, however, the SNP has diluted rather than consolidated the left-leaning identity that underpinned the independence movement and the 2015 election win, taking Brexit as an opportunity to plant itself more firmly in the liberal, anti-populist and pro-European centre ground. This vision of Scotland as a fortress of bourgeois enlightenment is nothing new. In 1977 Tom Nairn, discussing the party’s geopolitical ambitions, wrote that ‘the SNP ideologists tend to perceive us as paid-up members of the élite already’; in Nairn’s own utopian imagining, Scots were more likely to ‘end up as noisy outcasts, breaking the club windows in order to get in’,*
Nairn wrote as the radicalism of the Scottish nationalist movement approached its historical peak. In the late 1970s, Labour’s fear of SNP gains in its heartlands ensured that a devolved Scottish Assembly appeared to be almost guaranteed. This prospect, combined with a widespread sense of global breakdown and the ‘twilight’ of British social democracy, provided a horizon-line upon which left-wing nationalists hung extravagant prophecies about Scotland’s future. In one article, Nairn described ‘a situation where political revolution is a virtual certainty, where the forms of the state are likely to alter profoundly in a long period of uncertainty and escalating conflict.’* In another, Neal Ascherson wrote that ‘the Assembly is the hole under the fence of the British system, which can only get wider as first the SNP, and then the bolder Scottish socialists, and finally a whole people thrust their way through it.’†
Supporters of Jeremy Corbyn will recognise the way in which the mere hint of an impending transformation blows open the vaults of possibility, releasing long-gestating ideas and infrastructures into the light of day; this constitutive power of a new political horizon, however moderate or speculative in reality, forges new political networks and intellectual sensibilities that tend to outlast disappointment.
When disappointment came in 1979 – in a referendum, majority support for the Assembly failed to pass a prohibitive turnout threshold, and Margaret Thatcher took power shortly after – these radical openings slammed shut. But one legacy of this period is a tradition of cross-party work on the Scottish left that is almost entirely absent in England, and a deep left-wing consensus in favour of some measure of national self-determination not just as a means of better governance but as a potential vehicle for radicalism.
The Scottish radical tradition which was revived alongside the prospect of devolution in the 1970s is now scattered across the SNP, Scottish Labour, the Scottish Greens and the Scottish Socialist Party, all of which have played prominent roles in the Scottish Parliament. It can be found too in a small set of left-wing counterpublics, from social media networks and online fora such as Bella Caledonia and The Ferret, to campaign groups such as the Living Rent tenants’ union, the Common Weal ‘think and do tank’ and the Radical Independence Campaign.
The new horizons offered by the independence referendum of 2014 gave this tradition a desperately needed shot in the arm. Unionism offered no such generative horizon, and the intellectual and political infrastructure of the anti-independence Scottish Labour left emerged from the referendum as stagnant and cantankerous as before. With most of its natural base already diverted into the independence movement, Corbynism in Scotland produced little in the way of an intellectual or political renewal for Scottish Labour. Richard Leonard’s victory over the ‘moderate’ Anas Sarwar in the 2017 leadership election reflected the moribund status of the party establishment more than any left-wing resurgence.
Much of the SNP’s radicalism, meanwhile, is buried in its past, and the only broken windows for which the party can claim credit today are those of Scotland’s crumbling local facilities. Far from fighting austerity, the SNP have passed it on to councils: while Holyrood’s revenue budget fell by 2.8 per cent between 2013–14 and 2018–19, the Scottish government handed down a 7.5 per cent cut to local authorities over that period. A reduction in the ability of local authorities to adapt to local needs reflects the SNP’s ‘this far and no further’ approach to decentralisation, drawing power towards Holyrood from Westminster and local government alike, on everything from policing to taxation.
It is no bad thing that the Scottish Parliament has continued to decommodify basic services under the SNP, building on an earlier Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition policy of free personal care for the elderly. Free tuition, free prescriptions, free bus travel for young and old and free period products across Scotland (a policy pushed through by Scottish Labour MSP Monica Lennon) all contribute to a renewed vision of social citizenship outside market mechanisms. Each moment of free access, however modest, forms a utopian breach in capitalist realism which allows social demands to be ratcheted up. These rationed glimpses of life beyond market determination supply contemporary Scottish nationalism with much of its remaining left-wing and emancipatory energy.
But declining standards in health and education provide recurring headaches for the party, indicating growing crises within two systems which form the bedrock of devolved administration. There is an element of genuine helplessness here, for the generalised threshing of the UK’s social fabric by the post-2007 recession and UK austerity has been only slightly reduced in Scotland by devolution, placing far greater strains on public services than their diminished funding can support. There is only so much that the country’s devolved institutions can do against a right-wing UK government which retains key powers over policies such as welfare, immigration, tax and spending. This flattering comparison of domestic inadequacy with neighbouring cruelty allows the SNP to absorb much of the criticism of its record into the broader case for independence.
The vision of independence has also been diluted since 2014. In the aftermath of the Brexit vote, Nicola Sturgeon tasked Andrew Wilson – former RBS economist, SNP MSP and now corporate lobbyist – with chairing the SNP’s Sustainable Growth Commission. This was supposed to update the economics of the case for independence, drawing on a range of sympathetic expertise that was noteworthy for the absence of trade union representation. Its report concluded that Scotland could join ‘the best small countries in the world’ – Denmark, Finland and New Zealand – within a generation, but only through some tough choices.
Two choices in particular stood out: first, deficit reduction through the restriction of public spending increases to ‘significantly less than GDP growth’ over a five-to-ten-year transition period, which both the Institute of Fiscal Studies and left-wing critics within the independence movement have argued is a recipe for a decade of austerity; and second, the retention of sterling as Scotland’s currency without any say in its governance, which some independence supporters have attacked as a further abandonment of economic sovereignty to the UK. In the SNP’s positioning, the ‘progressive’ justification for independence is now rooted more directly in fear of a hard Brexit and popular disdain towards the Conservatives than in any direct challenge to the British economic and political system.
The wider independence movement’s self-image of simmering national potential and popular radicalism is also undermined by the realities of the SNP’s independence strategy. No matter how great the party’s ‘mandate’ from Scottish voters, the power to hold a binding independence referendum is reserved to Westminster, where the Conservatives’ reliance on unionist votes will encourage them to ignore that mandate indefinitely.
Although extralegal alternatives to a legal referendum have been discussed among the wider movement, there is little of the deep and existential cross-class interest in Scottish nationalism that can be found in genuinely revolutionary national movements. Broad aspirations for the ‘normality’ of nation-statehood – which can also be found among economically anxious ‘No’ voters – are not matched by the bootstrapping popular will to achieve it.
While this would almost certainly make the eventual winning of independence a historically (and laudably) peaceful affair, it also exposes the relatively shallow justification for it: England’s political priorities may be increasingly and painfully divergent from Scotland’s, but they do not involve the actual subjugation of the Scottish people to anything approaching colonial rule. If Scotland is a victim, it is a victim of its own relative size and circumspection, of a quiet reluctance to test the depths of its unique identity and collective power: a condition of ‘self-colonisation’, in Nairn’s words, shared with every nation whose middle and working classes have taken, when offered, the opportunities and patronage of a larger, more powerful neighbour, constructing in the process a bridgeway to assimilation which is prohibitively expensive to destroy.
The renewed sense of constitutional disempowerment created by Brexit among Scotland’s traditionally cautious middle classes resonates with a deeper and more sustained experience of collective economic marginalisation across both working and middle-class Scots. The Conservatives’ removal of support for Scottish industry, combined with their attacks on the public sector during the 1980s, had a genuinely cross-class effect in Scotland. More of the middle class was employed in and around the public sector than in England, and Scotland had fewer private sector options to move into. Devolution’s appeal as a middle-class barricade against future disruption in Scotland is obvious in its politicians’ and intellectuals’ continued enthusiasm for the country’s bulging public, third and cultural sectors, all of which provide reliable sanctuaries for the castaways of collapsing academic and journalistic job markets.
But in the world of ‘making things’ – the essence of Scotland’s twentieth-century economic identity – sanctuary is hard to find. Last year, the continuation of Scotland’s long-term industrial decline was hammered home through the high-profile but unsuccessful campaign by Unite to save the St Rollox ‘Caley’ railworks, a fixture of Glasgow’s Springburn district since the mid-nineteenth century that was mothballed for want of new investment. The Caley’s owners, part of a German-based multinational, chose to concentrate their work in England. They calculated that English yards would be better equipped to service the newly upgraded rolling stock of ScotRail, the Scottish rail company contracted out to Abellio, which is run by the Dutch government.
Meanwhile, on the coast of Fife, the two yards of Burntisland Fabrication or ‘BiFab’ faced substantial job losses and the threat of mothballing as work dried up. BiFab’s transition from fossil fuel infrastructure to renewables connected nicely to the ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ promised by Alex Salmond during the SNP’s successful 2011 Scottish Parliament campaign, but global markets thought otherwise: despite BiFab’s proximity to the planned fifty-three-turbine Neart na Gaoithe windfarm off the Fife coast, the vast majority of turbine jackets are to be constructed in Indonesia, with just eight going to BiFab after a sustained campaign by the Scottish Trades Union Congress and GMB.
This is a new and more insidious version of what the Tory politician Walter Elliot once described as the ‘denationalisation’ of the Scottish economy, fatally undermining cross-party ambitions for renewables-based reindustrialisation. In the 1940s, Elliot was referring to London-based nationalisation which took power away from native Scottish capital; today, the control of Scotland’s economy shifts between opaque multinationals.
Scotland’s policy ambitions are in many ways those of a typical North European state, yet it lacks the accompanying material supports of a large, high-quality native manufacturing sector, powerful trade unions and a public-spirited, well-resourced bourgeois press that can facilitate nationwide consensus around balanced development. Even Scotland’s distinctive elite media is now undergoing the same experience of branch-plant offshoring that it once reported in concerned detail.
This slow collapse in the economic conditions of self-determination offers, however, some paradoxical consolation for the Scottish left. With its fragile industry, political marginalisation and defensive trade unions, Scotland may lack the requisite infrastructure for socialist revival; but in the absence of real state power and confident native capital, it is also lacking in nourishment for an independent and ambitious political right. Instead, the nation’s politics are structured around a stifling ideological stalemate, wispily abstracted from political economy, which is often confused with progressive consensus.
This vacuous anti-materialism is what makes the Scottish political system such a secure bolthole of centrism against a global shift towards the extremes. The absence of more vigorous partisan conflict between independent class interests is what allows the SNP – by its very nature, the party most capable of changing its colour to suit a distinctly national political character – such undiminished hegemony.
If there is a more immediate threat to Scotland’s bland stability, it comes from independence. The SNP’s programme for independence represents a recognition that the first step to independent statehood would be the build-up of a native capitalist class, while demanding ‘partnership’ – as the Growth Commission report puts it – from the labour movement. Its deficit-cutting plans represent a clear programme of primitive accumulation, redirecting the wealth produced by the Scottish people from public services towards a hoped-for influx of international capital that would quickly make the Scottish Parliament its own.
This presents the Scottish Labour Party with a clear dilemma. Unless it wishes to abandon much of its progressive appeal and compete with the Conservatives for socially conservative unionist votes, its electoral pitch needs to focus on those working-class and left-wing middle-class voters who voted ‘Yes’ in the independence referendum and now mostly vote SNP or Green. Yet it cannot begin to rebuild its credibility with those voters without a noticeably radical, and highly risky, change of position on the national question.
The Labour Party has thus far tried to fight the SNP by simply outflanking it on the left, with little success. Scotland has two intersecting political cleavages – left/right and Scottish/British – and the left-British demographic is simply too small to sustain a serious challenge to the SNP. Labour has, throughout its history, sought to straddle this territorial divide with a ‘Scottish and British’ identity, the limitations of which have been exposed in its institutionalisation. The Scottish Parliament’s contradictory origins – both in and against the British state – have combined with the rise of the SNP and the rightward, anti-European drift of Anglo-British politics to split Scottish and British identity further apart, leaving Scottish Labour dangling over the chasm, clinging for dear life to the red in the Union Jack.
Labour is highly unlikely to return to power at Westminster without some kind of public compromise with England’s proudly reactionary political culture, allowing the SNP to continue knotting leftish liberal democracy and Scottish identity together to maintain its secure position at Holyrood. For those elements of the left who fear a return to the Presbyterian darkness of the 1950s, this is an unappetising recipe for intensified self-colonisation. Scottish politics, surrendered to the SNP but held back from independence, will only stagnate further, and such stagnation is already becoming a breeding ground for the development of our own, indigenous strains of cultural reaction.
Former first minister Alex Salmond is reportedly keen on staging a Holyrood comeback after his acquittal on sexual assault charges, and accuses the party’s current leadership of conspiring against him. Some Salmond supporters favour a more radical ‘Plan B’ approach to independence, involving open confrontation with the British state. Some have also orchestrated a furious backlash against the SNP’s attempts to reform the Gender Recognition Act, sharpening a culture war at the heart of Scotland’s ostensibly liberal establishment. This is a recipe for vicious internal turmoil equivalent to the struggle of Blair versus Brown. If Sturgeon cannot survive it, the cosmopolitan trajectory of mainstream Scottish nationalism could be redirected into something more populist, exclusionary and socially conservative.
If there is a way out of these dynamics, it may yet go through the British state – but it cannot end there. With the SNP degenerating, there is a clear need in Scotland for the distinctive combination of economic transformation and radical cultural politics that Corbynism articulated. But the Labour left is no use to Scottish socialists if it cannot empathise with and support efforts to break away from the anti-democratic political and media system that spent five years sabotaging Corbyn’s chances. And there is much Labour could still do to prove its worth to left-wing independence supporters: through a programme of carefully targeted economic reconstruction and the redistribution of industrial power, a Labour government at Westminster could create in Scotland the conditions for a far more democratic form of political, economic and cultural independence, achieved through the patience and realism that the SNP claims to support.
This could be premised not on outright separation but on loose confederation – though this would require a complex relationship between Scotland, the remainder of the UK and Europe. Scotland could free itself from marginalisation by English majorities without further sacrificing itself to foreign investors, while Scottish Labour could realign itself with its progressive base and create the foundation for a friendly and egalitarian relationship with its neighbours in the former United Kingdom.
This analysis will be tested by the coronavirus crisis. Do the Johnson government’s emergency interventions provide fresh resources for a revival of popular left-unionism to rival that which followed the Second World War? While the viral threat may provide a powerful binding agent, the accompanying economic crisis will not. The UK’s ruling classes, embracing different forms and identities across nations, have evolved to thrive in those gaps between incorporation and fragmentation, exploiting devolved limits and ambiguities as comfortably as they wield the power of the central executive.
Its working classes have not done the same, and Labour was always naïve to think that it could exploit or manage those contradictions through the trick of ‘more devolution’. A world-historic economic crash prompting new conflicts over the distribution of resources and the limits on central power is far more likely to expose than resolve the profound flaws of that system, encouraging rather than slowing Britain’s long breakdown. In such circumstances, it is only by seizing the wheel and steering carefully towards a break-up in its own image, rather than gazing aghast at the spectacle of decline, that Labour can reverse its downward slide in Scotland, and Scotland’s with it.
__________
* With apologies to Andrew Greig: Electric Brae, London, 1992.
* Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism, London, 1981, p. 193.
* Tom Nairn, ‘Revolutionaries versus Parliamentarists’, Question 16, November 1976, p. 4.
† Neal Ascherson, ‘Return Journey’, Question 1, October 1975, p. 5.