The Point

Last updated: 27 June 2022.

The Jimmy Reid Foundation

Robin McAlpine reflects on the first year of The Jimmy Reid Foundation

 

 

Something happened towards the end of last year that might seem pretty insignificant to you but really made me smile. It was a simple thing; the launch of our report on why we need to defend universal public services was reported under a headline in The Herald which said “Reid Foundation...”. See, I can't even remember the rest of the headline. I'm just chuffed to get a straight name-check.

Let me explain why this matters. A number of us on the Board of the Scottish Left Review had been talking about the need for some sort of left-wing think tank of some sort in Scotland. In fact, we've been discussing this or something like it for much of the time since the SLR was launched in 2000. In its original conception the SLR would have been more than just a magazine; Jimmy himself saw it as the seed of a bigger, wider, non-party left movement in Scotland. The problem was a simple one – we had little or no money and coming by the kind of money needed to maintain a properly-operating think tank is not easy.

So we watched as devolved Scotland found its feet. There were few moments in that first decade when you wouldn't have said 'you know, Scotland really needs a source of proper left-wing thinking', but by 2009 it had reached the point where the need became to pressing to ignore. You could take your pick of reasons – the collapse of the SSP/Solidarity movement as an electoral force, the neat assumption by the right-wing media that this 'proved' left politics in Scotland were dead, the rising dominance of a number of right wing groups and think tanks becoming much more coordinated in their push for a rightward drift in politics (privatise Scottish Water, charge tuition fees for students, cut costs for business more and more), the SNP's courting of big businessmen, Scottish Labour's drift into paranoia...

Looking from the left, the scene was a mess and pessimism was rising. But you could trace almost all of this back to three key factors.

First, there was the problem of division. Tommy-or-not-Tommy, independence-or-not-independence, conservation-green-or-radical-green. In far too many cases the Scottish left was being dragged into divisions which were based on identity and not policy. Left SNP hates Left Labour and visa versa, both with a degree of vitriol they often lacked for those in their own party who are political opponents. The SSP-Solidarity split needs no more said about it. Ever. Many in the socialist movement saw the Greens as a 'middle class party'. If tribal identity is the problem, we need to find a way around it.

Second, there was a weakness in thinking. It is important to be careful here, because it is not that all left thinking was weak – far from it. The problem was that it was patchy, strong in some places, not in others, unconnected in some places, failing to answer key questions in others. And often nothing like visible enough. Neither the SNP nor Labour had any real intellectual input, relying instead on the low-level grind of 'received wisdoms' often plucked straight from the CBI website. There just wasn't enough coordination in producing ideas and putting them together. The SSP had been a focus for this (great thinking work done on the Scottish Service Tax or on drugs policy for example). Now it wasn't – and nothing else obvious was.

Third, in too many ways the left operated like it was still the 1970s. Over the last 40 years, for better or for ill, there has been a revolution in political practices. The professionalisation of politics and its presentation left the left behind. All the powerful interests in society learned basic truths like 'if the media doesn't have your phone number they won't call' and 'it is never enough to assume that someone has read something you produced' and 'changing people's minds requires extended, coordinated engagement'. The left didn't. We didn't do the things that others do to control the agenda – and then we complain about the agenda.

This created the three-part strategy that lies at the heart of the Foundation:

• Unite people around ideas, not organisations or identities
• Create new thinking, design programmes of action, bring good thinking together
• Professionalise how we promote our agenda and how we engage with others

The last of these was my professional background before running the Foundation. We've built relationships with journalists, built coalitions of support around specific issues, coordinated campaigns to press messages in a consistent way, made sure the media knows there is always a way to get hold of a left commentator and so on. I wouldn't say I'm 100 per cent happy with the progress we've made but it is certainly an improvement on before.

The second is in some ways the easiest – there is simply lots of good people doing good work in Scotland. We have built up effective networks of thinkers in different areas and the good will towards the Foundation has made it comparatively easy to produce high-quality work. A strong Project Board (that guides the work of the Foundation) has helped us to observe where there is a need for new and better thinking.

And the first of these objectives? Well, let's not get carried away here. My perception is that the animosity on the non-SNP/Labour left has greatly diminished anyway. Certainly we've had no difficulty working with people from a very diverse background. But it'll take more than a think-tank to fully embrace both the SNP and Labour left in the current climate. We've had some success – on issues like local democracy, public procurement and the People's Charter for example we've found no problem in generating cross-party support.

But in a world in which someone is always watching your social media for any sign of 'pro independence' or 'anti independence' sentiment, we'll never get it wholly right. So some criticised us for inviting Alex Salmond to give the first Annual Memorial Lecture – which we thought would be fairly uncontentious given that he is the First Minister. Others speculated that we were a 'Labour sleeper organisation' given our close involvement with the campaign to prevent the SNP reversing its position on NATO. At the moment, Johann Lamont's comments on universal public services have left us highly critical of Labour's direction of travel, making us less than flavour of the month. But this will change and swing back – we're soon going to increase our criticism of the SNP's corporation tax cut policy.

Independence and the debate is of course colouring everything. Most of the left is pro-independence – but a sizeable group is not. This is perhaps the hardest thing to handle. We resisted doing anything on independence in our first year (many wanted us to) so that we could build some relationships on the basis of other work. We have allowed space for debate for all sides and when we do engage (with a major project to be kicked off this year) we will not be advocating for or against. But it is simply impossible to manage – everyone seems to be on one side or the other and mistrust is inevitable.

We will never reach a moment where everyone thinks we've got the balance right. But we do agonise over it and I think we've managed better than most.

So in the year since we properly started operating we've produced five major reports with two others to arrive soon. We've published papers and briefing notes, run a major lecture, written for many different media outlets, got people on TV, helped left groups with advice and support, especially on public affairs matters, coordinated campaigns, run a popular blog, used social media extensively and built up a membership base which is nudging 1,300.

But why am I so chuffed about one headline? Because it reflects one of the big challenges we identified at the first meeting of our Project Board. Right wing think tanks have a habit of simply recycling dogma as analysis. If they were properly challenged much of what they claim would start to look less like analysis than opinion. But generally they tend not to get challenged. They work within the narrative of the corporate media and a nexus of well-funded opinion-influencers. The most telling comment at our first meeting was that we need to realise from the beginning that we have a higher hurdle to jump. We need to be twice as authoritative, we need to be twice as careful with our evidence, we need to double-check everything, we need to make sure there are no credibility gaps. Because we will face that kind of scrutiny.

So to have produced (at that point) four reports which were controversial in terms of usual political debate in Scotland, to get to the point within a year where not only are we still being taken seriously but have reached a point where our recognition factor is high enough that we can be named on the political pages without an explanatory note is an achievement. It suggests we've been matching credibility to radicalism. That was our aim.

What next? Well, we have an incredibly busy work programme for the coming year. We have a major report on poverty soon to be published, an even bigger report on a future Scottish economy, analysis of the flawed thinking behind the SNP's corporation tax policy, an investigation of whether the NHS in Scotland is getting a fair deal from big pharmaceutical companies, another Annual Lecture in the Autumn due to be given by Len McLusky, General Secretary of Unite, the results of our Commission into Fair Access to Political Influence, and our Independence Papers series, five reports to be published over 2013 on what Scotland could do with the powers of independence (and for balance, what risks might come with them).

We are working to be an open and participative organisation with our members and members of the public being encouraged to get involved with some 'open source' policy-making by sending their own thoughts to both the Commission and (soon) to the Independence Papers. We really hope people take us up on this to see if we really can 'democratise' thinking in big policy areas.

Are we needed? Yes, now more than ever. If we hadn't produced a firm, intellectual defence of universalism, who would have? The SNP might have made the case anyway but it might have been pitched to 'middle class service users' rather than being an explanation of what it means for poverty and inequality.

Are we secure? No. As Director I am the only person who works for the Foundation. We have no overheads. Even so we have never had more than four months of financial security. If I wasn't taking a salary about the level of the living wage we wouldn't manage that. We are not core funded by trade unions but survive mainly on the basis of individual donations. To be sustainable we need to get 500 people making a small, individual donation of £5 a month. These are our sustaining members. But we are less than a fifth of the way there at the moment. We need your support. You can become a Sustaining Member on our website.

If we'd been told what we'd achieved in our first year when we were setting ourselves up, we'd have been very happy. Now we're established, my mind is turning to what we can achieve over five years. We might yet manage to play an important part in changing the politics of Scotland. We hope you'll join us to find out.

Robin McAlpine is Director of the Jimmy Reid Foundation