In neither the UK nor Scotland is democracy being eroded from the right, it is being eaten from the top-down and fed to them from every direction. The right is just profiting from this, not doing it. Until this reality is properly accepted, the decline will continue.
Before I get to Scotland, let me very quickly explain this. In the US, democracy is being eroded mainly by corporations and the super-rich, but with them now in a mutual relationship with the far right. It is money that did for everything.
Citizens United is the seismic Supreme Court decision that it was basically unconstitutional to do anything to regulate money in politics. The (patently absurd) argument was that money was ‘speech’ and so the protection of the freedom of ‘speech’ included the right to distort democracy with cash.
It created the path that led to the first billion dollar political campaign in world history (Kamala Harris). Polling made clear that she needed to be more aggressive towards big money and harder on Isreal if she wanted to win, Democratic National Committee doctrine is that he who has more money wins. You don’t raise money attacking big business or Isreal – so she didn’t.
But that is only half of it. The long distorting effect of big money in US politics has certainly key to the social trends which have made the US angry, but the natural direction for that to have broken would be to the left. It’s the strategic right-wing spend on distorting politics from outside politics that has been crucial.
While the UK has a biased media, we also still have a plural media, if only because the BBC covers what all the media is covering. A Daily Mail reader may only read the Daily Mail, but they’ll know about the kind of issues being covered in the Guardian, if only by osmosis.
In the US the hard right has used enormous sums of money from retail and oil oligarchs and then more recently from tech oligarchs, and they’ve used it to create well-funded completely self-contained media environments. People who watch Fox News simply have no idea what happens in any other part of the media, and the right-wing podcast and influencer world is hermetically sealed.
Democracy in the US is deliberately being eroded by the far right which is using enormous sums of money provided by oligarchs to create a completely isolated and propagandised section of society who have all-but abandoned collective US society for a far-right dream state.
Simulating caring while demonstrating you don’t care through your actions is better thought of as contempt
That is categorically not at all what is happening in the UK. We are getting plenty of the blow-over from the US far right, and the merger of Nigel Farage and the right-wing newspapers has some parallels to the US, but in reality the right is largely profiting from other failure, not from their own long-term planning.
This is why I get more and more angry at John Swinney’s stupid, stupid summit the further I get away from it. I can only put it like this – you can hold a summit and ask why trust in democracy is in free fall, or you can bung your colleagues £20k a year in a pay rise so they can boost their already-generous final salary pensions, but you can’t do both. Not seriously.
Likewise if you’re saying (dear god) that you need to discipline poor families into work by making sure they can’t feed their children properly (literally the reasons Swinney gave for not increasing the Scottish Child Payment), you better not be simultaneously incentivising the worst and least capable group of politicians ever to have run Scotland by bunging them a pay increase which alone is nearly the median salary for a single person.
This is all entirely Janus-faced. It’s all ‘accountability and servant of the people’ for a couple of hours in a set-piece simulation of giving a fuck about the public for pre-planned PR purposes, right until it goes back to not giving the slightest of a damn about the public as you pocket money you don’t deserve, screw up everything and then try to cover if up – and never, ever pay a price for failure.
Nothing creates animosity like having your intelligence insulted through self-serving hypocrisy. Simulating caring while demonstrating you don’t care through your actions is better thought of as contempt. But it ain’t just the power-bearers who are doing this.
What really prompted this piece was a comment from a Green activist I saw. To be clear, it is the Scottish Greens who have now normalised the process of accusing senior judges of making decisions not based on law but based on ideological hatred. That is now a thing an elected politician in Scotland can say. And there was little-old me restraining myself in my comments about Lady Dorian’s guilt-finding and sentencing of Craig Murray. Why didn’t I just claim she was a fascist, like Maggie does?
Anyway, because we live in a democracy, some people from respected institutions objected to Ms Chapman’s accusations being levelled by an elected politician. The debate has not subsided and that is where we get to a Green activist writing the following words: "The Law Society and the Faculty of Advocates would do better to avoid trying to interfere with politics, which is the superset within which law operates".
Let me help you with that. The vast majority of autocrats claim to be following the law of the land. Many of them actually claim to be taking absolute power specifically to restore the law of the land. Trump is claiming that the problem is activist judges deliberately misinterpreting the law of the land. They don’t actually say that law is subservient to politics.
There is really only one political doctrine that considers law to be a subset of politics. It is fascism (medieval monarchism is out of fashion). It is not a progressive position. If law should not interfere with the whims of a politician, they would all be exempt from hate crime laws. It is genuinely remarkable to see these words. They are a repudiation of western liberal democracy.
On an every day basis you cannot exert any meaningful democratic agency in Scotland, you can only watch powerful people fail and then hold summits to discuss your bad attitude.
So we’ve got constant contempt and failure from government, ‘left liberals’ who no longer support the rule of law if one decisions goes against them, a Labour Government which seems to be a modern art project to see how quickly you can alienate a population through lies and mendacity, Tories who are play-acting at being far-right hard men and then a summit to work out what is wrong.
Meanwhile there are serious, intelligent people who are trying to engage with this issue and the Scottish Government couldn’t care less. As John Swinney runs around trying to get the people who have led Scotland for decades to dig deeper moats to keep them safe from the unhappy hoards, there are people who understand what is going on.
Let me use the term "ambient powerlessness". It comes from this really excellent and thoughtful piece from Assa Samake-Roman. She describes it as the "insidious experience of being told that you are included, while finding that the tools for meaningful action are missing". Scotland tells you you’re part of democracy, but if you try to play that part, you’ll probably find out otherwise.
She puts it as succinctly as anyone could; "a democracy is only as healthy as its everyday practices". Well our democracy has no everyday practices. On an every day basis you cannot exert any meaningful democratic agency. You can only watch powerful people fail and then hold summits to discuss your bad attitude.
This is what drives me up the wall about this; as Greens are questioning the rule of law, Nats are stuffing their pockets while they can and Starmer is too busy caddying for Trump to care about anything else, there are loads of people who were not at that stupid, insulting summit who have real expertise and understanding.
I don’t mean the kind of people with ‘expertise’ who get invited to these meetings and somehow always end up telling the politicians what they want to hear (and then always seem to end up getting lucrative government grants or cosy and lucrative appointments). I mean people who are actually worried about democracy rather than their own incomes.
Those people have presented loads and loads of ideas for rejuvenating democracy in Scotland and fighting back against the ambient powerlessness that marks our lives. They have all been ignored. They’re being ignored right now. The powerful want to save democracy but not at their own expense. So not at all.
Scotland’s democracy is not under assault by the far right. It is a completely different situation than the US. There is no far right media ecosystem in Scotland, no well-funded far right think tanks or pressure groups or campaign organisations. We don’t even have a functioning hard right party just now. The right is pretty toothless in Scotland. It doesn’t have anything close to the power or reach to erode democracy.
But our leaders and political insiders do have that power, and they have exerted that power, and the public really is very disillusioned with it, and so now they’re trying really hard to persuade you that all of this is because of Reform or online misinformation. I’m pretty sure they know that isn’t true. I suspect they even know this is making it worse. They definitely know how to make things better but refuse to do it.
That is where we are now – politicians pouring fuel on a fire they claim they want to put out but which is actually keeping them lovely and warm. We get to watch them, lit by the glowing embers. As long as we do it quietly and from a distance.