[Robin McAlpine Blog] Indy progressives should take care

[ALBA-Bot]

Indy progressives should take care

I’m not sure entirely what happened on Saturday. For me personally, the world looked slightly different on the way out of St Giles Cathedral than it did on the way in. Alex Salmond’s memorial service was a deeply emotional affair. There are occasions when, as they say, ‘you can feel it in the air’, and this was one of them. I may therefore be misreading its implications.

But I don’t think I am. I think there is a chance this is the start of a significant realignment and, if it is, I have a message for those who may feel they lose out. Please, we still need you. Don’t isolate yourself, don’t make it impossible to be part of something bigger, but don’t pretend that we can continue as things are without change.

Let me sketch out the shape of what I can see. There are and always have been many tribes inside the independence camp. I’m from what you might call the ‘economic left’, or what others inaccurately term a ‘populist left’. I’m driven by the belief that our economic system is imperfect and creates harm for far too many people. I want reform. It is not the only thing I believe in, but it is fundamental.

I’m just going to call that ‘the left’ here, but there is another strand of left in the movement too (although these distinctions are a bit arbitrary). It tends to be called ‘progressive’ and has a different focus, starting from the point of reforming personal actions rather than systems of power. It is dominated by identity politics, which you can tell because they attend events to do with gender or sexuality in large numbers but are often absent from events to do with poverty or war and peace.

Then there are what I’d call the nationalist-nationalists. Their fundamental belief is in sovereignty, and while many of them would also called themselves left, they are more likely to also take the form ‘our business leaders, not their business leaders’. This group keeps finding its way back to oil and gas as a defining issue.

And then there are conservatives. They can (a little unkindly) be thought of as the ‘Scottish regiments brigade’. Often inspired by history or culture, they stand out a little more in the independence movement because this group, largely alone, don’t see independence as a ‘change issue’ so much as a pride issue.

In the past the tensions in the independence movement lay between the left and the conservatives with the nationalists mostly tending towards the left but swinging towards the conservatives fairly often. It was occasionally an uneasy alliance but it more or less worked.

That it fell apart so horribly over the last six or seven years is not an accident. Yes, there is a strand among ‘progressives’ which is problematic, quite literally obsessed with exclusion, who is in who is out, who is justified and permitted, who is out and verboten. If you believe that everything boils down to individual actions and accountability for them, then others must ‘reform or die’.

A subset of progressives were constantly finding ideological impurity in all kinds of organisations which by total coincidence also seemed to challenge some Sturgeon self interest or other

There was always a blacklist mindset in parts of the left, but it has been fuelled enormously in the last decade. Yet even that was not key to the divisions in the independence movement. Had the minority of angry progressive-minded exclusion-happy people not been weaponised in factional fighting, we’d all be rubbing along just fine with the usual spats and tensions.

But when it came to faction fighting, weaponisation was key. In fact, let me be a lot more specific here. Nicola Sturgeon and Peter Murrell ruled through a combination of high-minded public statements linked to the kind of lowest-minded politics possible. Very like the Starmer project, the goal was never victory but only annihilation.

It was not enough that Sturgeon retained power. It wasn’t even enough that the source of that power should not be challenged. It was necessary that, in power, she was never challenged at all about anything. Forget anything she said in public, in reality Sturgeon would tolerate no level of criticism and no level of accountability.

Peter ran the punishment beatings. During indyref a senior unionist whom I’ve got a lot of time for told me that the nasty social media pile-ons were being coordinated by Peter Murrell. Honestly, I thought he was being paranoid and that even then social media was perfectly capable of being horrible all by itself.

I now acknowledge I was wrong. Shortly after this I started to notice that the pile-ons were very similar in character but constantly shifting target. It wasn’t unionists that were being kicked up and down, it was (initially) Rise and the Scottish Independence Convention. The former was a political party trying to continue in the spirit of the referendum, the latter was an attempt to create an all-movement forum for discussing and planning the future for independence.

I was a little taken aback with the ferocity with which people were attacking Rise, whose founding members after all were colleagues who had recently played a very important part in frankly rescuing the SNP’s pretty dire official independence campaign. But it was when they came for me I couldn’t miss it any more.

Because I’d wanted and had worked for a plural, inclusive, fairly flat structure for progressing independence, I started to find a group of phrases being used about me. They were always the same phrases, as in verbatim the same phrases. They were always ad hominen and they always questioned my legitimacy for even considering myself to be part of the independence movement.

More to the point, all of these attacks on me and on Rise and not long after on Alex Salmond and many more, were coming from the same people for the same reason using the same language. I later met someone who had been in meetings discussing the coordination of all-out attack on Sturgeon’s enemies.

It was from two groups she drew her attack squad. One was the traditional nationalists for whom (at the time) the SNP was the movement, and the other was the most aggressive strands of the progressive movement. There is a small minority in politics which frankly seem to be there because they like fights, and so when someone wants a fight kicked off…

Before you knew it, the SIC was (bizarrely) under attack from these progressives, then Common Weal, then All Under One Banner, then Salmond and his supporters. Basically this subset of progressives were constantly finding ideological impurity in all kinds of organisations which by total coincidence also seemed to challenge some Sturgeon self interest or other.

By the time of Alba this process was complete. Most people on the left and progressive wings were ready enough to go along with the increasing attacks since they were being told it was about getting at ‘baddie’ and ‘enemies of independence’. For a short period the traditional nationalists went along with this.

For inclusiveness to be possible, progressives must look to themselves and reflect on why it is that they are now so disliked and distrusted

But the more the targets expanded, the more people started to have trouble with it. An awful lot of people had been to All Under One Banner marches where speaker after speaker tore into poverty and the Tories and austerity and corporate dominance – only then to hear AUOB be attacked as reactionaries.

So the bullies concluded what they always conclude – nearly there. Only seventeen more foes to vanquish and we’re all-conquering. Except by this time the traditional nationalists were out the building, along with the economic left, and the conservatives. A lot of the softer progressives were clinging on on a ‘I don’t love this but if we can just suck it up until we get independence…’ basis.

But it wasn’t working, and that is fundamentally where this all falls down. Even as Sturgeon’s staffers were briefing centrist media about how they’d nearly completed their process of total victory, so at the same time the wheels were coming off the machine. The referendum promises were getting dafter and dafter and government was a mess.

That’s what takes us to Saturday. So, so many people have now been chased from the party. I looked around that Cathedral to catch sight of person after person of substance and standing. Let me put it this way; Shirley-Anne Sommerville and Shona Robison and Angus Robertson would not have improved the calibre of who was in the building.

Fundamentally, the ‘factional progressives’ punished and disciplined people on the basis of promises they failed to keep, and it has caught up with them. They have neither the qualities nor the support to deliver anything of any substance and the more they ask us to believe in them, the less we do.

Thus there is much talk about ‘getting rid of this lot’ in the movement outside the SNP. Which takes me back to the beginning; there is now shaping up to be some kind of process of rebuilding the cause of independence and a lot of those concerned are minded to exclude the progressives. Certainly there are some veterans of this era of dirty tricks who don’t deserve to be at the table based on their behaviour, but to extend that to everyone else is unfair.

Personally I hate identity politics, and the kind of politics which intersperses liking a tweet about genocide in Gaza with six enthusiastic tweets about the burning desire to see the new Wicked movie isn’t for me.

Yet that’s pluralism for you. The progressive faction thought that by excluding everyone else it could hold power forever, but at a certain moment if you exclude everyone, you’re isolated. That’s where they are now. It isn’t healthy for anyone if they stay like that. I don’t want a movement that excludes them any more than I wanted a movement that excluded the ‘Perthshire Tartan Tories’ back in the day.

But for inclusiveness to be possible, progressives must look to themselves and reflect on why it is that they are now so disliked and distrusted. Yes, it has been earned, but there is time to repair even this – so long as there is change, patience, acceptance and a recognition that total dominance in a diverse society can never be achieved through exclusion.

Source: Indy progressives should take care