[Robin McAlpine Blog] Is there no end to the contemptuousness of policy elites?

[ALBA-Bot]

Is there no end to the contemptuousness of policy elites?

Here we go, exhibit 241,735 in the series ‘reasons why everyone hates liberal elites’. This piece of evidence is helpful in understanding why elite politics is so arrogantly unaware of what it sounds like to those who are not doing really nicely out of the status quo. It is from Neil McKay’s interview slot this weekend.

(What is it with his choice of interviewee? Does he get sent suggestion lists by MI5? It seems always to be spooks and nukes…)

Basically the new Executive Director of the Scottish Council on Global Affairs has just put us plebs straight on our stupid fantasy of becoming an independent country. It isn’t an option just now, she explains, and the reason for that is that we can’t be having any disruption when the world needs Scotland to host nuclear bombs for Europe so we get incinerated in a nuclear war and they don’t.

That’s it. That’s the total of her thinking on why we can’t have Scottish independence. If you can’t see why this is so offensive, let me help you out a bit…

You see, there are children who are hungry in Scotland. There are patients dying in hospital corridors. We’re decarbonising at a snail’s pace. Our business base is being cannibalised by global equity funds and foreign corporations. There are quite a lot of things in Scotland you’d want to see getting rather a lot better and many of the key policy levers for making those things better are reserved in London.

Obviously it is perfectly reasonable to hold the opinion that independence isn’t the solution, that clinging onto the UK is a better bet. I have always disagreed but I’ve always respected that opinion. What I have no respect for at all is the arrogant high-handedness contained in the quotes offered by Dr Mateja Peter.

She may be a thoughtful and intelligent voice on international affairs and the fact that her first interview in Scotland made her sound like an AI trained only on Atlanticist cliches may not be representative. Perhaps its a feature of her first language not being English, given that she’s Slovenian.

(I’m tempted to say ‘Yugoslavian’ because presumably she doesn’t recognise the independence of Slovenia coming as it did during a period of enormous regional instability, but that would invalidate the democratic will of a nation that chose a different path than the US-led foreign policy elite and so would be disrespectful.)

She just assumed that Scotland and its people are a pawn in a global game being played well above our heads

But for someone from a ‘non-partisan research hub’ (their description) to be so partisan seems a deep misjudgement. She takes as for granted that the primary purpose of the existence of the nation of Scotland is to protect the Nato alliance at all costs. That there is a whole world of respectable non-aligned thinking that does not see Nato as a good thing isn’t even referenced.

Likewise her dogmatic explanation that our duty is to host Trident nuclear bombs for everyone else but absolutely not have a say on how our economy is governed would be bad enough if there wasn’t very substantial global opposition to weapons of mass destruction.

For a lecturer in foreign affairs she doesn’t seem to be aware that there is a UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (the TPNW). That a United Nations treaty cannot even be considered a possible perspective from which to consider the role of nuclear weapons in 21^st century Europe, that this entire line of thought at a global level doesn’t merit a passing mention, is not academic rigour.

And for the, like, one millionth time, you all know that Trident is not an independent nuclear deterrent, it is a missile system we don’t own or properly control which we lease from the US and which literally everyone knows will contain US overrides? Britain doesn’t need an independent nuclear deterrent because it is getting on fine just now without one and everyone whom it might deter knows it.

So if Dr Peter wants to make the case that Europe’s only hope is to shelter under France’s nuclear umbrella, or if she wants to make the case that Britain should rapidly develop a nuclear delivery system independent of the US, make the case. But this lazy nonsense is not it.

But back to the main point here; so what if Dr Peter thinks we’re all mad to want independence? I mean seriously, who cares? She didn’t say ‘from a foreign policy perspective’ or ‘in terms of international relations’ or ‘thinking only of European security concerns’, she just assumed that Scotland and its people are a pawn in a global game being played well above our heads.

I could very well agree with her that a united Western world armed to the teeth and continually fuelling a new cold war is the best way to keep global peace and still feel that wanting Scotland to be independent is not a contradiction, or that Scotland just isn’t that important to the Western alliance that we’ll sink it by having sovereignty. That’s basically the position of Stewart McDonald.

Alternatively, I could disagree strongly with this, be in favour of a Scotland following a strategy of regional collaboration and global non-alignment and find every aspect of her argument specious, lacking any consideration of plurality of view and fundamentally failing in the duty of academia to explore rather than dictate.

And neither of these things matter. Because, whether Dr Peter likes it or not, half of the population of the country want independence. That’s what she needs to know, that in a democracy policy elites do not dictate what people can or cannot have.

You think you could explain to the parents of a child in poverty that Starmer’s approaching welfare cuts are a price well worth paying so we can keep increasing the militarisation of Europe?

To return to my original theme, this kind of high-handed arrogance is why trust in Western elites is in freefall. So when she dismisses the entire concept of national sovereignty with "I don't think that at the moment it's in anyone's interest to add a second layer of domestic volatility, when so much is unknown about our international context" I rub my eyes in wonder.

Whose interests? You think a child in poverty benefits from the status quo? You think you could explain to the parents of a child in poverty that Starmer’s approaching welfare cuts are a price well worth paying so we can keep increasing the militarisation of Europe?

It seeps through this entire interview. "Having a discussion about independence will muddy the waters on security." Even mentioning independence would tip the world into war because it would undermine the only concept of security available to humankind.

Apparently Scotland has no option but to stand “shoulder to shoulder” with the UK and Europe because we are united in our “common agenda” to stop Trump. One wonders if Ms Peter reads the newspapers. Europe does not and will not have a common agenda on Trump and none of it has anything to do with Scotland anyway.

"We should have been talking about the foothold China has established in Greenland." Should we? I mean, I suppose if you’re a wild-eyed economic nationalist or something. What if China makes better and cheaper electric cars and in doing so makes much better use of mineral resources than Elon Musk and his AI data centres?

In fact the entire agency that she sees Scotland as having is to influence policy on the Arctic. And by influence I mean ‘do as we’re told’. Because "it would be very difficult to imagine a situation where in any serious discussion on Arctic policy the Scottish Government goes against the UK Government".

Of course I’m worried about our unstable world. Of course I care about Scottish security. Of course I want an informed debate to shape thinking on these subjects – but this wasn’t it. The point about all of this isn’t whether someone follows global affairs and analysis as closely as I do and so understands fully why this interview was so incredibly ripe for detailed, line-by-line rebuttal.

It’s that a policy elite we’ve never heard of turning up out the blue and telling us what our own personal priorities are and aren’t and explaining what we can and can’t have in terms of an elite obsession most of us don’t care about as if we as citizens have no agency over our society is a concentrated dose of the contemptuous attitude that has plunged Europe and the US into the crises they are in.

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