[Robin McAlpine Blog] They’re all Tories now

[ALBA-Bot]

They're all Tories now

It’s hard to know what to say about the state of politics in Britain any more. After that budget there is no kidding ourselves on any more. We have three-and-a-half Tory parties, one centrist party and one and a half parties focussed on identity politics.

There isn’t a consistently left-of-centre party at all, there’s no radical left party and there isn’t even a traditional labour party (which could be pretty conservative but was still recognisably a labour party).

Meanwhile everything is getting worse and worse and it is now becoming difficult to remember a time when things weren’t clearly getting worse. Dissatisfaction is rising and rising. The pressure on our system of democracy is growing all the time and there are a vanishingly small number of pressure release values available – and no likelihood any will work.

We talk about young people as being disconcertingly lacking in confidence in democracy, but so am I. Our democracy is clearly failing. Our society is clearly failing. Our nation state is clearly failing. And there is no immediate way out. If there is nothing good that can happen, then something bad will happen.

Reform is what used to be the very right of British politics. There hasn’t been a real far right in the UK, certainly not in organised terms. And yet Reform isn’t as right as it gets in Britain. You can actually shift Reform further to the right by cherrypicking some policies from Labour and the Tories. Some going that.

The Tories are becoming what Reform was. Given what I’ve written you’d think that means that Labour is becoming what the Tories were but, in a quite startling betrayal, Labour is instead fighting with the Tories to also become what Reform was. The Liberals are now what Blair’s Labour used to be.

Meanwhile in Scotland all of this is what is happening to the UK parties, and that leaves a gaping void – who is going to fill the role that the Tories used to play? The SNP! The SNP is. It’s not there yet because it has some legacy policies that Swinney hasn’t managed to get rid of, but I am pretty sure he would if he could.

Asking us to save ourselves locally in the most centralised Western democracy is insulting

Remaining left-of-centre policies in the SNP? There is a continuing commitment to free university tuition and free prescriptions. The party would fall apart if these were reversed, which I’m pretty sure is the only reason in the world Swinney hasn’t reversed them. There’s their poverty agenda, but as I keep trying to point out, if you see one part of that agenda getting funding you can be certain it has been taken away from another part of the agenda.

The Scottish Government seems to have a long-standing ‘this is the poor person fund so if you need to look like you care, shift money around inside the poor person fund’. I’ d almost guarantee you Swinney would like nothing more than to reverse the anti-nuclear position.

But in social services terms they look like David Cameron’s Tories and in terms of free market economics they would make Thatcher blush such is their unwavering commitment. Their ‘land reform’ agenda is fake and hawking Scotland’s natural resources to foreign corporations is the one thing they do with enthusiasm. Even party loyalists accept that independence is no longer part of the agenda of this administration, other than in the most abstract sense.

Then there are the Greens. In England they are hardly the party of the working class but they do have a solid economic agenda and look something like the traditional left. In Scotland the Greens primarily seem interested in battles over liberal identity politics. It has no serious economic agenda. It barely has a serious environmental agenda.

I want to explain what that looks like from the next layer where you might hope to find hope – the civic world. These days we can pretty well just write off the big NGO sector so commercialised is it. They don’t seek to offer hope, just milk public funding.

But that leaves a fairly rich ecosystem of smaller NGOs, the odd think tank, campaign groups, self-starting initiatives and actions, and localism. Where stand those?

Focussing on Scotland, we can just rule out much of the self-start stuff and pretty well all of the localism. It particularly irks me that a bunch of liberal commentator types who once assured us that criticism of the Scottish Government was unfounded are now taking the view that the Scottish Government is so bad that the rest of us just need to ‘do it for ourselves’ somehow.

The primary feature of people who say that is that they have never tried to do any such thing themselves. Common Weal pushed hard at the idea of ‘don’t ask permission, try it for yourself’. I couldn’t begin to count how many great activists and volunteers from across Scotland we’ve come across, all trying to do good things. Go and ask them what it was like. Most were worn down by Scotland’s paternalistic view that ordinary people doing things is unseemly.

Asking us to save ourselves locally in the most centralised Western democracy is insulting. So is asking us to come up with exciting policy possibilities. Next weekend the Scottish Independence Convention has assembled a really strong lineup of thinkers who will turn up in Govan’s Pierce Institute and discuss an exciting policy agenda for those political parties who want to achieve independence.

The idea is that it could show how a radical exciting, transformational policy programme could rapidly create progress towards independence. But the SNP will ignore it because the SNP ignores everyone. I’m really serious about this; go and talk to anyone in the sort of policy campaigning sector and they’ll tell you the same thing: the SNP doesn’t care.

The political parties have let everyone down – they’re not good enough, they’re not clever enough, they’re not honest enough, they’re not moral enough

It doesn’t care at all. I have been in so many coalitions on so many subject areas proposing so many good ideas. Common Weal has offered loads ourselves, and we watch great ideas coming from others. The SNP itself actually passes resolutions on these at its party conference, but the result is always the same. The leadership doesn’t care. They don’t have to.

Labour and the Tories are constantly shifting. Reform is staying the same. You can’t shift the SNP with a stick of dynamite so instead they drift. None of them are changing society. All of them are making cynical attempts to game the voting system. The SNP may be most cynical of all. It now knows that all it has to do is absolutely nothing but bed-block independence for the foreseeable future.

The weird thing is they’re all useless. I mean they’re all really useless. Starmer’s administration is way out of its depth and yet Badenoch’s opposition make them look good. In terms of governing, the SNP is pretty well as bad as it gets other than Truss. The Greens haven’t exactly been competent when they’ve had power to wield. In Scotland it’s not really clear wha the Lib Dems are for. I amn’t convinced Alba knows what it’s really for itself.

We can’t think our way out of this. We can’t influence our way out of this. We can’t inspire ourselves out of this. We can’t campaign ourselves out of this. We can’t walk away and do something else. We can’t walk away and not do something else. I am reaching the point where I believe we can only politic our way out of this using hard power.

It doesn’t look to me like there is much option left other than building a new political party from the ground up, and that takes time. It won’t happen by 2026, and 2031 is a long time away. It’s a pretty dispiriting picture and I’m very angry at basically all of them. They have let everyone down. They’re not good enough, they’re not clever enough, they’re not honest enough, they’re not moral enough.

So that’s it. Tories to the left of us, Tories to the right and here we are – stuck in the middle with each other. This is how democracies end.

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