I think there was only one time I was in a real, literal eye of a storm. It was in Mexico and I remember how unnerving it was – massive winds suddenly subsided into a relative calmness. To all the world it was over, but you sensed it wasn’t, that it was swirling everywhere around you.
It’s a human failure, our inability to properly appreciate systems that are bigger than us. To us, that storm was two different storms with a brief gap in the middle, but that isn’t what it was at all. It was all one system. The calm was part of the fury, the fury part of the calm. And so it is with the Scottish Election, the British Labour Party, the Iran War, the crisis in Europe…
I feel it myself. I have been telling myself ‘just wait until this election is over’, like there is a before and an after rather than just an ongoing now. I’ve been telling myself ‘don’t pay too much attention to Keir Starmer, he’ll be gone soon’. And even though I’m definitely not someone who is waiting for war to end so we can get back to ‘normal’, I am waiting patiently for the aftershocks to arrive properly.
So I’m waiting in a calm-seeming lull in a raging storm – and it is all total nonsense and I need to give myself a shake because this isn’t calm, it is numbness, and this isn’t a natural phenomenon but a human one and so one we can refuse to accept in its current form.
Let’s take a wander through this unnerving calm just to show you what I mean. First, Scotland. Someone catches me in the street and says that of her seven work mates, she is the only one who is going to vote tomorrow. I’m used to low interest in this election but the person concerned works in a sector you’d expect to be right up at the top in terms of civic engagement so it startles even me.
The media have struggled to pretend this is an election about something in the same way that the politicians have. I ask someone else what their experience has been and he tells me it’s just parties telling him not to vote for someone else, that his job is to ‘prevent’ some other party taking power.
That at least is an accurate assessment of the situation. This isn’t an election with people who stand for a mission fighting to see that mission realised, it’s a bunch of people who want a job and don’t want you to give it to someone else. That seems to me to be the long and short of the election.
Politics isn’t going to change itself and there isn’t a normal any more, unless we are trying to call decline normal
During this palid time I’ve been doing something a bit different. I’ve been trying to work out who will be running the country for the next five years and how they’re going to go about doing it. I am finding it very difficult because of one piece of information that keeps coming back to me from multiple sources – senior politicians feel stuck because the civil service won’t ‘let’ them do things.
I hear this so much now. I know this is partly self-serving blame-passing from underpowered politicians, but I’ve heard this from so many other sources – that the civil service does whatever it wants and the politicians just read out the press releases. There is no ‘once we get started again’, Peter Mandelson’s right-hand-man is still in charge of our economy and he’s still selling Scotland to anyone who has a few bob.
Politics isn’t going to change itself and there isn’t a normal any more, unless we are trying to call decline normal. So let’s not wait for a year for the new lot to ‘bed in’, the only chance we as a nation have got is to turn on them and force them to act. And if it is the civil service which is really the block then the politicians can tell us or pay the price. We just can’t wait any more.
Likewise the UK. We’ve gone into one of those phases where I chuckle more at The Guardian than I do at the Beano. How many ‘Starmer is safe and you should all back off’ articles do they really have in them? They are reluctantly forced to admit that no-one wants Starmer to lead Labour into the next election, but can’t we enjoy this period of calm and stability for a bit?
Let’s start of with ‘away and fuck yerself because your arguments are so clearly punk’. Apparnetly the British public will ‘not forgive’ Labour if it goes into a self-serving, inward-looking coup process – says the people who did not wait for even a year after Corbyn was elected to mount their first electoral challenge.
Then they absolutely had to act because Corbyn was destroying the party. Well it’s in a very much worse state now so how is that an argument to hold on a bit? In any case, in the real world it is keeping the least popular Prime Minster ever on purely because of factional corruption in the Laboru Party which is the thing I suspect the public will not forgive them for.
But on they wait, a lull in the storm until Wes can get out from under Peter, or Angela can wriggle out past HMRC, or Andy can find a sacrificial lamb whose job to take. A little longer, a little longer. Starmer’s people ask us all to wait until he ‘delivers’, like we don’t know that that is never going to happen.
This isn’t a pause, it’s the sound of paralysis
So we wait, and we wait, pretty certain that Westminster won’t sort itself out but not even nearly responding to this by making the argument for independence more compelling. Nope; something will come along, if you’re patient enough.
And the world is in denial over Iran. Or at least the Western World is. I’m writing this as Donald Trump has tried his latest version of ‘I surrender, but you go first, and then we’ll be friends, or I’ll kill you all, one or the other, but a deal is close, unless it isn’t’. And the oil markets go ‘phew, I really want to believe this is true so I just will even though I know it’s not’.
I can’t get into the AI bubble here because it is too complex (and frankly too depressing) but the smart money is still that it will bring the economy down, and that was before Iran. But on we wait, Europe wondering if there is an ‘after Trump’, America believing whatever it wants to believe, Britain paralysed and broken and lost and clueless, sailing its aircraft carrier to Cyprus and back because we have nothing else to do with it.
The point is that the world is about to go through another convulsion. We know what it will roughly look like if not the details. We know already what the massive failures of our economic model are doing to people and we know why they are failing. So what on earth do we gain from waiting?
We could take action now in Scotland. In fact there is a possibility that we could actually take advantage of a crisis for once by getting in front of it, understanding it and grabbing the opportunities it throws out. That isn’t something that is happening in Scotland, and I doubt it will.
So yes, I keep saying things like ‘once this election is out the way’ or ‘perhaps a change in Labour might…’, but I know it’s just me expressing my own disillusionment with politics. The only feeling I can drag up just now is dread that I’m going to have to sit through another five years of inadequate-but-all-powerful governmet at Holyrood.
But as I await what feels more like a nasty dental appointment than my once-in-five-years chance to shape the government of Scotland, there is something that is gnawing at me. Gramsci is a genius but he’s wrong. The old is dead but the new will never be born. It is made, created, designed. It is our decisions which will make it.
So not, in the famous quote about morbid symptoms being what lies between, perhaps we need to understand that we are the morbid symptoms, a generation of people more disengaged with our own decline than makes any sense.
This isn’t a pause, it’s the sound of paralysis. It is part of a giant system we’re caught in. Somehow we have to get ourselves out of this, because the storm will be back before we know it. And we’re not even nearly ready.