I will be absolutely honest; since I took that week off to do DIY right at the end of November, I’ve struggled to be motivated. You’re not going to make any case to me successfully that suggests 2024 was a good year. I have only until the end of this week to work since I still have unused leave. It would be easy to just write the year off.
But that would be to miss a few of the good things which are happening. I know, I know, it doesn’t feel like it, does it? What good stuff is happening? Well, it’s subtle, but there are things changing in Scotland and globally and while things may feel pretty grim just now, that doesn’t mean that’s where they will end. Let’s have a look.
First, politics is volatile. I know this is supposed to be a bad thing, but we’re coming out of what was basically 40 years of completely stable politics, and that period is what has caused everything people are angry about and complaining at now.
Because here is a truth seldom spoken; if politicians are comfortable in a steady-state position, that is bad for the rest of us. For the last decade the SNP has barely had to work for its dominant position. I mean literally, ask what the government did for you over the last ten years and the list is threadbare.
If you want politicians to work for you, they need to be a bit afraid of you and what you might do with your vote. When Scottish Labour was weighing ballots rather than counting them they became complacent and lazy and got tangled up in the self-pleasing clientalism that comes with unchallenged power. The SNP hasn’t really been any better.
They really don’t care what you think politicians – unless you can fire them, and really simply put, there was no party in Scotland that felt like they might be fired. That is no longer the case. The current bizarre swings in the polls show that the support for all of them is paper-thin, and the few wiser heads among the politicians know that.
So if you’re sitting over Christmas and someone says ‘oh dear, Scottish politics is getting volatile’, ask how they felt stability worked for them. Just as economic monopolies or cartels are bad for customers, so political monopolies and cartels are bad for citizens. Something new might actually happen now.
We have a sliver of a chance to move beyond this stupid, failed economy theory, a sliver of a chance we’ve not had in my lifetime
That is made even more likely with the increasing feebleness of the ‘centrist consensus’. I amn’t celebrating Trump’s victory one little bit, but at least it has ripped apart the consensus view on politics. For almost my whole live we have lived under one ideology – bureaucratic, technocratic management of centre-right economist-defined social indicators implementing almost identical policies no matter who won power.
A good way to think of the ‘culture wars’ is as a pretty consequence-free pantomime between two economically-identical political parties trying to find a way to present themselves as different from the other lot. In Scotland the constitutional question has had a similar effect.
I actually watch Scottish economic development strategy and policy and do so fairly closely. That puts me among a fairly small band in Scotland and there is a consensus there too – it is basically a series of soundbites which sit atop a hill of subsidy and policy gifts to whichever corporation is spending the most on lobbyists.
I mean, the debate about whether Scottish Enterprise should or should not be funding arms companies making weapons for Isreal is dancing on the head of a pin; it’s not about whether there are abuses of those weapons or whether they are used in compliance with UK law, it’s why we’re giving freebee handouts to massively profitable global corporations at all.
Centrism was a cover for neoliberalism, and neoliberalism was about moving the theory of the economy away from ‘competition benefits consumers’ into ‘what benefits the rich and powerful benefits consumers’. It was never true, and the wheels are coming of now.
This gives us a sliver of a chance to move beyond this stupid, failed economy theory, a sliver of a chance we’ve not had in my lifetime. So let’s embrace that possibility and make the most of it.
Other positive things are happening in Scotland. The civic sector is a key partner in democracy but, to its great shame, the civic sector in Scotland largely sold out. Its role isn’t to deliver government policy, or it shouldn’t be. It should be to shape and change government policy, a role they effectively abandoned when the bribes started coming.
Make no mistake, bribed they were. Blair was explicit about it, made clear that turning troublesome NGOs into ‘delivery clients’ would extract any teeth or spine to be found in the sector. Sturgeon turned it into her core strategy of governing. She was so free with the cash bungs to civil society that civil society frankly disgraced itself and turned into a strange combination of consultant, cheerleader and pretorian guard.
Finally some people in that sector are openly admitting this is what happened and are calling for a change in direction. This is very healthy indeed and cause for cautious optimism. That this new-found self awareness has emerged only as the bribes ran out is less than flattering for the civic sector, but this is an article about taking any wins you can, so…
Another fall-out from all of this disillusionment is that people’s worries are becoming more tangible, more real – and the realer they are, the more that can be made of them. I was pulled up on climate change fears by a working class guy I know locally who I’ve not really known to have been political before. The idea that we’re all comfortable with what is happening to our climate and environment is simply not true.
This is the raw material for change, and again it is hardly an instance of ‘total victory’, but does offer real opportunity. That is a good thing.
So long as people could pretend to themselves that what is wrong with Britain was just a function of one transitory management regime, they could cling to the idea that all that was needed was a change at the top
Finally for this piece, I can only reiterate that I always thought that what gave us the final ‘permission’ for a big shift on independence in Scotland wasn’t a bad Tory government but the experience of switching them for a bad Labour one. So long as people could pretend to themselves that what is wrong with Britain was just a function of one transitory management regime, they could cling to the idea that all that was needed was a change at the top.
It seemed clear to me that when they got a change and nothing, well, changed, that would be a tipping point. From the outset, when Labour selected Starmer to take the party waaaay back to the technocratic right, I thought to myself ‘that’s my man’. I had no idea he would play his role with such serious aplomb.
I mean, I knew him and Rachel Reaves were bad, but I couldn’t have guessed they’d be this bad. Swinney and the SNP remain useless, and it is Starmer who is doing all the heavy lifting on delivering independence.
The weakness of the SNP is also finally providing another reason for some good news. For over a decade I have, on repeat, argued that without a dedicated, competent national campaigning body working on a coherent, unified campaign to persuade undecided voters on the case for independence from a non-party-political stance, we wouldn’t make progress.
To say that people lined up against that argument is an understatement; I was truly monstered for this suggestion. It was treated like an act of heresy, a signal of doubt in the divine nature of Nicola Sturgeon which seemed almost to breach some blasphemy rule, or a self-serving fantasy which failed to take into account how brilliant the SNP was.
I fought for years and years to create some unity and some collegiate structures to be told over and over that this was not only not necessary but utterly counterproductive. Well that isn’t what people are saying now. There are a growing number of ‘unity projects’ and they’re gradually linking up into something greater than their parts.
This is the most hopeful things a supporter of independence has been offered which isn’t a false promise of a shortcut. It is genuine reason for some optimism.
This doesn’t all mean that we’re anywhere but in a perilous situation domestically and globally, but it does mean that inside the gloom are glints of light. Whether they represent faint reflections of what was or whether they light a path forward we don’t yet know. But, in the dark, a flash of light is something to be grateful for.