Have you written an article on what Scottish politics can learn from Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York yet? Don’t you know it’s the new Ice Bucket Challenge? Only squares and losers don’t have a list of lessons for Scotland from his win, and I don’t want to be a square or a loser, so…
Here is what Scotland’s political class can learn from Zohran Mamdani. Fuck all. Absolutely fuck all. Nothing. Allow me to explain.
As you know I am a political strategist by trade. When stuff is happening in political strategy I pay attention. I have been following the development of the progressive network drive in New York for years. It was this network (in nascent form) which got Alexandra Occassio Cortez elected seven years ago. That in itself had been building for two years after the Bernie Sanders movement shaped the approach.
Which is to say that the seemingly endless list of people who heard about this for the first time last week but have opinions on it anyway do not seem to be hindered in their opinionating by lack of actual knowledge.
So you want a lesson from Mamdani for Scotland? First go back in time and rather than driving activists out of your parties for lack of unswerving loyalty to whichever leader or whichever ideology, instead trust them and build large, semi-autonomous social-political networks embedded in and run by people from the lowest participation communities.
In the absence of a time machine, wait a decade or so, because you have alienated so many of your core activists that it is going to take you a long time to rebuild their trust, never mind energise them to build many-fold into a really effective fighting machine.
Mamdani didn’t win because of a smart social media campaign, though that helped. He didn’t win it because he is handsome and charming, though that was a great benefit. He won because he had a real grassroots campaigning structure which enabled him to bypass the entirely hostile corporate-owned media.
So fundamentally you can’t erode your activist base to nothing and then learn anything from this victory. Yet it is worse than that – I don’t believe Scotland’s political leaders can learn even the most superficial style tips from Mamdani. What would they be?
Is ‘go home, sit in a darkened room and think about your life choices’ a learning point?
Well, what can Ross Greer learn? His homework would be ‘you need to be able to walk round Niddrie, Possil or Craigie without a minder, looking normal and chatting to people like you belong there’. So fuck all is what Ross can learn, unless ‘be a totally different person’ can be considered a lesson.
Likewise, what John Swinney can learn is to have some wit, some style, some real biting humour, a willingness to get off the fence and a capacity to see powerful people and not have the burning desire to drop to your knees. So, again, fuck all is what Swinney can learn.
Meanwhile, Anas Sarwar’s takeaway would be ‘have a personality’. Are you picking up how little watching Mamdani can bring to Scottish politics as they are?
Or is ‘go home, sit in a darkened room and think about your life choices’ a learning point? Because if anyone was in the slightest serious about learning anything here, that is the first learning point they would gather. It’s not what they do next that is the problem, it is everything they’ve done up to now.
I get so frustrated with listening to people writing about political strategy when it is quite clear that they don’t have much of a clue what political strategy is or how it works. It’s like me debating the best formation for a crucial moment in a netball game or offering golfing advice. I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know.
Or to give the direct comparator – what can I learn about playing football from Lionel Messi? Well, it doesn’t matter what I learn, I was never good at football (I was a rugby guy) and use a walking stick after a bad car accident in my 20s. I recognise Messi is a good footballer, but I also realise that none of his qualities apply to me.
It is precisely the same thing with Mamdani and Scotland. He represents a fundamentally different way of doing politics than anyone in Scotland. Every party in Scotland works on the basis that they have a base and so all they have to do is stop anyone else fishing in their base. The SNP doesn’t try to win over unionists, it tries to stop Alba from existing.
Labour isn’t really fighting the SNP, it is fighting the other unionist parties for the unionist vote. And the Greens aren’t fighting anyone, they’re just trying to carve out an eight-percent-sized hole in the list vote. Nothing they’ve done suggests any concerted effort to break out of that small bubble.
Scotland’s politicians are the definition of safe
Smug complacency and inward-looking solipsism are the hallmarks of Scottish politics. It is ten parts ‘control your membership’ to one part ‘care about a voter’. The SNP is ready to run a mass campaign just as soon as its membership stops trying to think for itself and does what it is told (which turns out to be never to have a mass campaign).
The Greens are ready to build a grand coalition just as soon as they have forced out anyone who does not sign up to their very, very specific ideologies. Labour just wants to not give any impression that England and Scotland are different things by asking its London office what to think on an hourly basis.
Plus none of them have any nerve, any chutzpah, any style. Greer is the stand-out among them in that at least he’ll take a strong stand on controversial points that the others won’t – but only if they are controversial points that are attractive to university-educated activists.
Scotland’s politicians are the definition of safe. There are no risk-takers. They pride themselves on how much they can conform to the standards of operation set for them by the Scottish establishment – be polite, don’t swear, never blame wealthy people for anything, talk big all you want but when you see a piece of legislation, water it down, that sort of thing.
There are mountains of lessons from what has happened in New York, but you can’t transplant them onto a different political context when that political context is more or less exactly the opposite of the political mindset from which the thing you’re learning from emerged.
Don’t worry though; expect every Scottish politician you know to do a Mamdani-style walk-round of something or other, or to put out a funny video. And having got that out of their system they will return to the only way they know how to do politics. Which is badly.
What Scotland should learn from Mamdani is not only that we have the wrong political leaders who are going about things in the wrong way, it’s that we have a badly misfiring political culture which makes a new generation of leaders worth having appear impossible.
You can’t build good strategy on bad foundations, and our foundations are rotten.