The Radical Nation

Published on National Collective 12/06/12

Scotland's 'radical' identity is imaginary. Thanks to a new and changing world of ideas, we've got a chance to make it real. 

During the unification of the Italian city-states in the 1860s, the novelist, artist and statesman Massimo d'Azeglio wrote: "Italy has been made; now it remains to make Italians." Italy remains deeply divided, and d'Azeglio's words have grown in power as a reminder of the complex relationship between statehood and identity. It's no surprise that politicians struggle to talk about it, as Ed Miliband did with concepts of Englishness and Britishness, because identity is a deeply subjective idea. As Mike Small of Bella Caledonia points out, if I want to describe myself as Scottish, English (I'm half-and-half), British or all three in a post-independence Scotland, it's entirely reasonable for me to do so. Americans have happily been Irish, Scottish or German for years despite having only the most tenuous of familial or geographical links with their chosen heritage, and it's only the most petty of geopolitical scrooges who seeks to deny them that pleasure. Identities are flexible.

But the derision that greeted Miliband's brave but clumsy attempt to define a left-wing English civic nationalism betrayed a complacency about our own national identity that is yet to be properly examined. Too many Scots still look to left-wing heroes like Keir Hardie, Jimmy Reid and James Maxwell as proof that we are a profoundly 'social democratic' nation, with a political culture far to the left of England's. The 'we're more left wing' argument remains the foundation stone of the Left's rationale for independence, and the SNP are equally guilty of propagating the delusion that independence is the magic spray that'll repel the bloodthirsty midge of Thatcherite Conservatism once and for all.

Anybody who's had the pleasure of dealing with those tiny carnivorous tyrants (midges, not Tories, though it works for both) will know that no matter how much you douse yourself in Avon Skin So Soft (trust me, it's the best there is), they still won't go away. There's no magic spray for the left, no easy way out for those who're sick of the Daily Mail and Theresa May and rampant consumerism and rocketing inequality and greed and banks and the monarchy and UKIP and Eton and Blairism and people who still use the phrase 'socialist yahoo' like it's an insult. With independence, those things aren't going to vanish. Sure, some of them would cease to be features of the UK and become features of whatever a post-Scotland entity would be called, but that doesn't absolve us of responsibility. Over the course of our coexistence with the British nations, we've played a significant role in shaping the nature of the union and we bear some of the burden of what we've created. We can't sweep Britain's shared challenges under the border and forget about them - regardless of whether you feel British or not, you should feel bound by the simple fact of your humanity to strive for a better life for those with whom you've shared a history.

In fact, some of those things would become problems that we would actually have to deal with ourselves, in our own parliament, putting trust - god forbid - in our own politicians. The idea that the Scottish people will automatically vote for the radical government needed to tackle the problems Scotland faces is a dangerous one. John Curtice and Rachel Ormston's paper 'Is Scotland More Left-Wing Than England?' tackles the issue head-on, using Social Attitudes Survey data to show that while Scots do display a slightly more social democratic mentality than the English, with higher levels of support for redistribution and greater equality, this has been in decline since devolution. More powers have not made us more radical. Those who believe that independence will automatically result in progressive, egalitarian policies should take note, now. The belief in 'magic spray' independence is an excuse to let the ends justify the means. I've argued before that a nation is forever defined by the nature of its creation, and we must not allow ourselves to follow the SNP down the road of appeasing small-c conservatives in order to win a Yes vote that would ruin our right to be radical. That's why the Greens are right to openly criticise the way Yes Scotland is being run.

Despite all the above, Scotland can be radical. The problems we face today can be boiled down to two things: concentrations of wealth, and concentrations of power. Throughout the 20th century, the ascendant theories of liberalism hoped to harness the deeply competitive side of human nature in democracy and economics. Through democracy and its checks and balances, sociopaths could no longer manipulate and cheat their way to absurd levels of power thanks to their own sheer disregard for ethics and their fellow humans; but through the modern, perverse reimagining of Adam Smith's free-market capitalism, opened up to pure competition, those same apostles of amorality could wield an equal or greater influence over the people they employed and the planet they destroyed. In his book 'What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets', the philosopher Michael Sandel argues that the free market encourages a degree of antisocial behaviour amongst its executives and elites that has been morally and socially damaging to a frightening extent. After all, it is profitable to use advertising to make people think that buying a big, gas-guzzling range rover will give them more status and happiness: those who can afford nice things get trapped into a spiral of unfulfilling consumption and environmental degradation, while those who don't have the cash become increasingly insecure about their own status as they see the material wealth of those happy, attractive and prosperous families in the adverts.

Thankfully, ideas are changing. At the end of the 20th century, the political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed 'the end of history' as liberalism triumphed. By the end of the 2000s, 'liberal' markets and democracies across the west lay discredited and depressed. Across the political spectrum, concentrated wealth and its accompanying inequality is condemned, while the concentrated power of centralised governments and corporate lobbies is mistrusted. In Scotland, the Jimmy Reid Foundation's report 'The Silent Crisis' sets out a radical new vision for local government which has the potential to redistribute political and civic power from central government. It is also the UN's International Year of the Cooperative - an increasingly popular business model that redistributes economic power from dictatorial executives to workers and consumers. The emerging disciplines of behavioural economics and positive psychology show a new way of thinking about humans as complex, often irrational beings motivated by human interaction more than money. Decaying theories are being challenged by a paradigm whose time has come - one that says that we are people, not robots, and we work best when we work together.

Like it or not, Scotland has been central to that old, dying model of the western world. From Adam Smith to Fred Goodwin and Gordon Brown, we've been one of the leading lights of a discredited way of doing things. With independence, we've got the chance to redeem ourselves. There is a new way of doing things, one that is bubbling under the surface, looking for a vent through which to spill into the international political consciousness. In leaving the United Kingdom, we wouldn't be leaving just any old country - we'd be deliberately and determinedly withdrawing from one of the main offenders of 20th century psycho-capitalism and beginning again at a time when there are new, truly progressive ideas about what a nation is for and what it can do. Those ideas will be at their most powerful in the next few years, as Europe struggles and the UK sinks, and they will undoubtedly play a central role in the foundation of a new Scotland. The UK is chained to the past, and no matter how hard it tries, it won't be able to make it out of the last century before it's overtaken by other, nimbler states. An independent Scotland must chain itself to the future.

We may not be as left-wing as we'd like to be. We may not be as British, or as English, as Ed Miliband would like us to be. But we are in a unique position to reforge ourselves as a nation in the heat of a new and inspiring world of ideas about what we can be. On October 6th, National Collective will attend the Radical Independence Conference in Glasgow, where these ideas can be shared and developed among leading figures of the Scottish Left. It's an opportunity for us all to look at the radical national identity we've been imagining for decades, and do something with that energy. In our minds, a radical Scotland has been made; now it remains to make radical Scots.

In Coalition Britain, This Is What You Get

Pasties, petrol and Peter Cruddas are obscuring the bigger picture - at our expense and the Tories' gain.

The video to Radiohead’s Karma Police shows a car pursuing an exhausted man down a dark road. At the end of the video, as Thom Yorke sings ‘For a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself’, the beleaguered escapee sees a line of petrol leaking from the car as it reverses away from him, presumably preparing to finish him off. He fumbles in his pocket, and produces a packet of matches. He puts his hands behind his back in apparent resignation, before dropping a lit match onto the trail of petrol. The flames run towards the car, which reverses frantically before being engulfed by flames. 

Perhaps in Coalition Britain, the anonymous driver of the pursuing car would have had the luck to run out of petrol just before reaching his quarry – one of the few true beneficiaries of the fuel tanker drivers’ strike that we are all supposed to be so concerned about – and there would have been no escape for the poor guy on the run. By the time his incendiary opportunity arises, he is exhausted – maybe, in Coalition Britain, he would have had the energy to carry on running until help appeared, deprived of the diet of pasties and booze that shrank his stamina and bloated his gut by the newly prohibitive pricing measures of our apparently health-conscious government overlords.

In Coalition Britain, the predator and prey of this sinister pursuit would look at the shining example of two ideologically incompatible political parties putting their differences aside for the good of the nation and think ‘we’re all in this together’ – the poor man on the road could get a lift home, picking up some cold sausage rolls for the wife, kids and overtaxed granny on the way.

For a minute there, I lost myself. Coalition Britain is, of course, a sham. Osborne’s much-maligned handling of the budget was in part the fault of some nifty leaking by his long-suffering coalition partners, bringing issues to the fore that would otherwise have been buried, à la Brown, under whatever ‘good news’ the Chancellor was able to offer. This is all part of the Liberal Democrats' ‘differentiation’ agenda, a too-little too-late response to public disgust at their willingness to trade principles for power. The only things left holding the government together are the chains of political expediency – an election now would reduce the Lib Dems to a handful of MPs, and the Tories would have to dilute their gleeful slashing of public services with some populist policies in search of a Conservative majority that remains highly unlikely.

Mmmm, taxes. Courtesy of Analiem

For a minute there, we all lost ourselves. As queues grow at petrol stations (although, I’d like to note, the one outside my window is having a quieter day than usual) and politicians extol the virtues of hot pastry products to an eager media, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is quietly and calmly announcing that we’re heading back into recession. And nobody seems to care.

For the last couple of weeks, it was almost possible to believe that the Tories had reasons to be worried. Polling numbers took a hit after the  budget announcement, and they’re dropping further after the ‘Cash for Cameron’ scandal. High-profile Tory pundit Tim Montgomerie fired a broadside at the party leadership, and Tory ‘detoxification’ guru and Cabinet Secretary Francis Maude made a fool of himself in front of parliament and then the public. The most recent developments could yet make things marginally worse for them (although if they can turn the tanker drivers' strike against Labour it could work in their favour), but everybody seems to be forgetting the bigger picture.

The coalition can U-turn all they like on taxes, squirm and repent all they like on donations, and Ed Miliband can sing the praises of Greggs ‘til he’s red in the face, but as long as the public and the media keep schtum about the cuts, Osborne will sleep soundly at night. Calmly and resolutely dismantling Britain’s publicly-owned services is his calling. Not only does he cling to his faith in the oxymoronic economic theology of ‘expansionary fiscal contraction’ (the discredited belief that spending cuts lead to growth), but he also hopes to combine a near-irreversible shrinking of the public sector with the widespread encroachment of the private sector into the gaps left behind by his slash-and-burn crusade. This private sector will be free from the moral checks and balances of what he condemns as ‘red tape’ – the regulations that, for example, stop corporations from discriminating against minorities, destroying the environment or firing employees without reason or notice. Essentially, he hopes for the brutal and uncontrolled private sector colonisation of a disheartened and defenceless public sector.

It is old-fashioned Thatcherite economics, where the pure, unthinking competition of an unregulated private sector weeds out the unworthy and rewards the capable. It is the abhorrent and archaic philosophy of Social Darwinism writ large across the economy and, by extension, society itself. 

Equally oxymoronic is Osborne’s embrace of ‘dynamic scoring’ – the (also discredited) belief that tax cuts ‘pay for themselves’ because they stimulate the economy. When George W Bush pioneered this in the USA, his tax cuts left a hole in the budget that was never filled. Jonny Medland in The Guardian writes that Osborne is using this flawed logic to justify the tax cuts that he hopes will help win the Conservatives a majority in 2015.

When we focus all our attention on pasties, petrol and Peter Cruddas, we lose sight of the real scandal at the heart of government – that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is visiting unprecedented destruction on the services of people who need them; he is impeding economic recovery and leading us back into recession; he is cutting taxes to make whatever is left even harder to pay for; and he is doing it under the auspices of nothing more than a corrupt and immoral ideology.

Is there a way out? Not with this government, it seems. The Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, regardless of policy differences on the NHS, taxation and whatever else becomes part of ‘differentiation’, will remain united on the timeline of the cuts agenda. By 2015, Osborne’s axe will have hacked through vast swathes of the services many people rely on. Waiting until the next election to reject this government won’t help those people; that’s why action is needed now.

The petrol tanker drivers’ strike could herald the start of a prolonged period of collective action against Coalition Britain – if Cameron, Osborne and Clegg can be convinced that they face electoral catastrophe in 2015, they might just ease off. There are myriad campaigning organisations willing to take the fight to Westminster, but without a wave of pressure from ordinary voters, their voices carry little weight. Liberal Democrats need to speak out against the cuts above all else, and any remaining One Nation Conservatives must do the same. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland can all offer alternatives, and it is from those Nations that the sparks of radicalism have blown south before.

What is certain is that stopping or restraining the cuts is impossible without massive cooperative engagement, and those who need to be engaged are being needlessly distracted by a media obsessed with the inconsequential banalities of relatively small-scale government incompetency.

Maybe the Karma Police have been at work. The events that are supposed to have ‘rocked’ the Coalition over recent weeks could be the doings of some greater force, a warning shot against the continued realisation of Osborne’s ambitions. I think not: the government is driving us down that dark road in that sinister video, one with no apparent routes of escape – no alternatives, as the Chancellor likes to remind us. Eventually, people will tire of it. So far, we have only seen a fraction of the cuts, and the vast majority are still to come. There may come a time when the British electorate, exhausted and appalled, will turn round to look Coalition Britain in the eye and quote Thom Yorke’s ominous chorus – ‘This is what you get, when you mess with us’. Let’s hope we’ve got a packet of matches in our pocket.