The Point

Last updated: 27 June 2022.

The Independence Debate

Is Scotland too conservative, (with a small c) to go it alone? The Point's Gary Fraser hopes he’s wrong but fears that the forces ranged against the campaign for Independence will win the day.

 

 

In all honesty I do not think that Scotland will become an independent nation in 2014. Due to a number of factors the odds appear to be heavily stacked against the YES Campaign. YES is up against not only a well organised and well-funded opposition but also a hostile media. Moreover, the polls suggest that the majority of Scots, including a majority of young people, do not support independence. Of course, polls can be wrong, and there is always room for error, but when every poll points in the same direction the signs are not good.

 

But putting aside my inherent pessimism, I do think that the debate is in itself an important process for Scotland to go through. It is afterall a once in a lifetime opportunity to engage in a discussion about the type of small country we want to be. Yet, at the same time, the dualistic nature of modern politics creates a ‘winning’ or ‘losing’ mentality more akin to sport than what should be the careful deliberation of public policy; in the political world of ‘us’ versus ‘them’, complex issues are reduced to soundbites which are memorised and repeated by the protagonists in the debate.

It strikes me that the SNP leadership is ill prepared for all of this, which is surprising considering independence is their raison-d’être. Despite the talk of the YES campaign being ‘cross party’, which it is, and more importantly ‘no party’, the reality is that the SNP are the only party in the coalition big enough and broad enough to make the difference in 2014. Therefore, the SNP matters. All of the other participants in YES can easily walk away after the referendum but whichever way the result goes next year’s referendum will fundamentally alter the psychology of the Scottish National Party.

Adding to the challenges facing the pro-independence movement is the fact that next year Scottish Labour is expected to announce that a future Labour Government would devolve more powers to the Scottish Parliament. ‘Devo max’ will be back on the agenda, and to coin a Labour phrase about devolution, it is likely to kill the nationalist cause stone dead. Or so Labour hopes. Of course the ‘devo max’ strategy is dependent on Labour winning a General Election in 2015, which is far from certain, but ‘devo max’ is certainly food for thought. At present, Scottish Labour is discussing what further powers could be devolved and popular amongst the Labour left is the idea of the Scottish Parliament having the powers to increase the top rate of tax. There is also a rumour doing the rounds that Gordon Brown is planning a return to politics and that he will lead Scottish Labour’s No Campaign. For many on the left, myself included, the name Gordon Brown is synonymous with Iraq and PFI, but he is nonetheless, a political heavyweight, a man of considerable talent, and a man who most decent folk wanted to be Prime Minister in 2010 instead of the noxious and intellectually vacuous current occupant of Number Ten.

The No Campaign also has the tactical advantage of being against something which in my view makes for an easier argument. Thus far the No Campaign has amounted to little more than the spreading of fear. And fear works. In politics whether the fear is rational or not hardly matters. On Sigmund Freud’s memorial are the words ‘the voice of reason is small, but very persistent’. How true. Yet, when it comes to matters of political discourse, reason is often absent. David Hume’s alternative, that ‘reason is a slave to emotion, not the other way round’, has always sounded more appropriate.

Project Fear - having a laugh at our expense

There exists in Scotland and across the rest of the UK widespread hostility towards the political process. This is a narrative which can broadly be described as anti-politics. It is a worrying trend and quite how this growing constituency will vote in the referendum is anyone’s guess. Recently, I canvassed on behalf of the YES Campaign and experienced it firsthand. The arguments are simple: ‘all political parties are the same’, or ‘politicians are only in it for themselves’, and that ‘nothing will change anyway’, etc. Cheap cynicism becomes a substitute for taking a position and thinking through the issues. Someone I know, who shall remain nameless, is voting no because of a profound dislike of Alex Salmond. And this is from someone with a university education. The standard of debate is slipping.

The anti-politics narrative, encouraged by the media has led to the rise of right wing populism, and out of this swamp crawls UKIP and the EDL. If right wing ideas are ‘populist’ (or popular?) it could be because many people are a slave to their emotions and not reason. What we feel becomes more important than what we think. From this perspective, perception is everything and it is a narrative which works against the left.

Take for example the issue of welfare reform. Many people now accept the principle that benefits should be means tested and not universal. Furthermore, widespread anecdotal evidence suggests that cross sections of people support benefit cuts. The idea that public spending on benefits is out of control has become a political truism. And whilst the left is correct to argue that benefits should be universal and that benefits cuts are unnecessary, making the argument and winning majoritarian support for the position are two very different things entirely. The ‘debate’ on asylum is another case in point. Many agree with bold statements that the country is ‘flooded’ with ‘bogus’ asylum seekers, although when you ask ‘how many?’ the result is often a stoney silence. Then there is the skewered debate on the EU. For three decades now the tabloid press and the Tory Party have declared war on the EU and seldom does the pro-EU argument get made. One pro-EU argument I did hear was made by my local MSP who argued Britons will never vote to leave the EU once they find out that will need a visa to enter Lanzarote! Whether this is true or not I have no idea, but I raise it here to make the following point: this is not a political argument for the EU but rather a silly point which constructs the electorate as slaves to their desires, docile fools incapable of taking part in rational discussion. The anti-politics narrative corrupts the way politicians and campaigners think about public and the result is always the same; politics is dumbed down and the electorate are treated as customers with political parties window dressed as shiny brands.

And back to my point about emotion. Britain stirs up many emotions. Not that far from where I live in East Lothian, (thirty nine miles down the A1 to be precise) sits the border between England and Scotland. For one reason or another it is a border I cross at least once a month and recently I have been thinking about independence as I have done so. Even though I support independence, there are times when I question my own judgement. For me, even now, independence can sound abstract, whilst my gut instinct is to regard nationalism as parochial and tribal. Someone asked me the other day what it means to be Scottish and I was genuinely stuck for words. On the subject of time St Augustine is rumoured to have said that he knew what it was so long as he was not asked to explain. I feel the same way about Scottishness. I am not proud of being Scottish but neither am I ashamed. It is an accident of birth and nothing more. I am no better or worse, than someone living in Newcastle, or Liverpool, or Manchester or Berwick. I have no beef with the ‘English’. My wife is English for goodness sake. Didn’t John Lennon, perhaps my favourite Englishman of them all sing, ‘imagine there’s no countries’? Do I really want to be associated with a campaign which draws yet another line in the sand based on a cultural identity which I myself find impossible to define? All of these feelings are genuine enough but then I remind myself that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the ‘real’ debate about independence. It’s back to that the emotional thing again.

The role of emotion in determining our political outlook is worthy of further analysis. Freud noted more than a century ago that our brains have a remarkable capacity to find their way towards convenient truths even if they are not all that true. Drew Weston in The Political Brain writes:

The brain gravitates towards solutions designed to match not only data but desire: by spreading activation to networks that lead to conclusions associated with positive emotions and inhibiting networks that lead to negative emotions.

Desire triumphs over data! Interesting point and one which I have to say upsets the rational social scientist in me. It means that people believe what they want to believe whether or not what they believe is true. Moreover, people will go to great lengths to avoid arguments that challenge or upset their ‘worldview’ or ‘regimes of truth’ to quote Michel Foucault. The religious and political ideologues are particularly adept at this.

Yet despite my pessimistic view I still cling to the hope that at the very least we can have an enlightened discussion about the future of our small country. This means raising the standard of the debate and being clear on what the debate should be about. It means thinking beyond emotive terms such as ‘separatism’ and ‘better together’ and substituting emotion for reason.

There are many red herrings in this debate. One of them is the view that Scottish nationalism is based on anti-Englishness. It is not. In its current form, mainstream Scottish nationalism views the nation state as a democratic construct not an ethnic one. Furthermore, it is a progressive response to the crisis in British social democracy, which I will come to in a moment.

In the attempt to frame the independence debate we should avoid becoming too obsessed about what currency Scotland adopts, or the EU, or the myriad of other complex or ‘wicked’ issues to use Stephen Maxwell’s term that will inevitably arise. We should also note, that Scottish independence is not a panacea which will remedy all of Scotland’s problems and no one should pretend that it is. The problems Scottish society faces, from intergenerational poverty to heroin addiction, are too ingrained to be solved overnight. Politics is the art of the possible. I for one stopped believing in utopias a long time ago and I accept that with ‘freedom’ comes ‘negative freedom’, i.e. the freedom to do things which are not necessarily in your own interest.

The followers of Leon Trotsky used to argue that you could not have socialism in one country. Today, the current financial crisis proves that capitalism in one country is not possible either. The future, whether it be left or right, or somewhere in the middle, is a global one. And in a globalised world there are many constraints, which often leads to opponents of independence into adopting a fatalist position. But accepting the realities of globalisation does automatically mean that opportunities have ceased and only constraints exist. Of course not. An independent Scotland has options and independence should not be confused with autarky or self-sufficiency. The debate on Europe for example, is not a simplified in/out argument (for the record I think Scotland is best served in the EU). Small counties exercise options all the time. Switzerland for example, is outside the EU but within the European Free Trade Area. The same is true of Norway and other countries; Finland, Denmark, Iceland and Sweden all have their own independent relationships with the EU, the EFTA and NATO. The debate should not be about the SNP either, whether it be their position on corporation tax (wrong in my view), its patchy record in local government, or the wider argument that the SNP’s economic policy is ‘neo-liberalism with a heart’ (Cuthbert and Cuthbert cited in Hassan, 2009). However, arguing that the debate is not about the SNP and achieving this, are two very different things and I am far from convinced that in the short space of time we have left that YES will distinguish itself from the SNP.

What then should inform the independence debate? For me, the starting point is this - what is the best way forward for progressive politics? For those who advocate staying in the Union they need to answer this question too. We also need to understand the origins of the debate.

Scottish independence is driven by two historical factors. The first is the crisis in British social democracy and the second is the democratic deficit both of which are interrelated. In regards to the latter, for 27 of the first 64 years after the Second World War, Scotland was ruled from Westminster by Governments it had rejected at the polls. When Margret Thatcher’s Conservative Party came to power in 1979 the Tories won 22 out of 71 seats. By 1987, they had just 10 seats and in 1997 they were wiped out altogether. It was not just the fact that Scotland was ruled by a Government it did not elect that created a new Scottish consciousness, for example Ted Heath’s government didn’t have support in Scotland, it was the extreme ideological nature of Thatcher and her ilk, which provoked a re-thinking of Scottish politics and in turn led to a questioning about the relationship between Scotland and the wider UK. This prompted the biggest crisis in the British Union’s history.

It is true that a genuine left of centre political consensus exists in Scotland. The point is not that Scots are more progressive than folk in say Yorkshire for example. I don’t believe that for a minute. The point is this: Toryism was seen in Scotland through a national prism and during Thatcher’s reign a narrative that Tories has ‘no mandate’ in Scotland was constructed which brought together the forces of progressive civic national identity with the politics of class.

The emergence of Scotland’s growing national consciousness occurred at a time when British social democracy was in a period of crisis and retreat. The rightward shift of Labour is well known. In Scotland, throughout the New Labour years there was steady decline in the Labour vote.

The crisis in British social democracy was not just a crisis in ideas, or the replacement of one set of values with another. In Scotland it reflected a withering away of the power of the institutions upon which Labour Scotland was founded. According to Hassan and Shaw (2012), the concept of what they describe as ‘Labour Scotland’ was founded on three institutional pillars: council housing, trades union membership and local government. The figures tell the story. In 1977, 54.4% of Scots lived in a council house. By 2005, the figure was 15.1%. In 1980, 55% of Scots were members of a Trades Union. This was down to 15.2% in 2010. The concept of class was still a valid conceptual tool in understanding the world, but the great Marxist historian Hobsbawm had been proved right: the forward march of organised labour had been halted. The changing demographics, especially the decline of heavy industry and the creation of ‘new towns’ in Scotland disturbed traditional political alliances. In addition to these major sociological changes, Hassan and Shaw note a religious de-alignment in the Labour vote. The Protestant Conservative vote had collapsed in the 1950s but the Catholic Labour vote survived for much longer, but the authors conclude that by 2011 (the year of the SNP’s historic victory), there was no longer a reliable Catholic vote for Labour.

All of these social changes fuelled the rise of the SNP. In addition, there was a qualitative shift taking place within the discourse of nationalism itself. Keating, cited in Hassan, 2009, is worth quoting at length on this:

From the 1920s both European Communism and social democracy tended to be centralist and favour the large states, which it was thought were better able to control the commanding heights of the economy and engage in large scale re-distribution. This opened up a gulf between socialism and peripheral nationalism.

However;

From the 1960s, this began to change under the influence of the ‘small is beautiful’ philosophy, disillusionment with centralisation, and the libertarian leftism of the 1968 generation. Peripheral nationalism moved to the left.

In Scotland, by 2011, the institutions which had laid the basis for Scottish Labour were in a period of terminal decline, whilst the SNP were viewed by many as a more credible social democratic alternative. Iain Macwhirter wrote in 2008, that the ‘SNP seems to have done more to further social democratic values in 10 months than Labour managed in 10 years’. And whilst this comment is problematic for a number of reasons, nonetheless the SNP in both the public’s perception and in terms of real social policies were to the left of both New Labour and Scottish Labour. Moreover, despite the Labour insult that they were ‘Tartan Tories’, a large scale study of the SNP membership revealed that on the left/right curve most party members ebbed towards the left (Mitchell, et al, cited in Hassan, 2009). Moreover, the authors of this study note that ‘the profile of the SNP in terms of age, social class, education and religion is not markedly dissimilar to the Scottish population’.

Whilst the SNP grew both in terms of membership and influence, Scottish Labour experienced a distorted and exaggerated view of its own importance in Scottish public life. However, because they kept on winning elections Labour strategists ignored the crucial fact that Scottish Labour’s social base was shrinking and that the institutions which gave rise to Scottish Labour were withering away. They failed to recognise that to many people, especially a new generation of leftists looking for fresh ideas, Scottish Labour appeared bureaucratic, managerial and lacking in ideas. Scottish Labour also suffered from the fact that the party’s big hitters wanted to play on a British stage and not a Scottish one. Scotland was a provincial backwater and whilst the politics of the individual can seem tedious or the stuff of bourgeois gossip, it is true that Scottish Labour since Donald Dewar has not produced a politician of the stature or calibre of either Alex Salmond or Nicola Sturgeon

I want to conclude this essay by making reference to the state of the Labour Party today. I focus on Labour for two reasons. Firstly, Labour’s abandonment of social democracy created a political vacuum easily occupied by the SNP. Once the SNP was in power independence could be legislated into existence. Whilst this strategy is successful, it nonetheless contains the following dilemma for the SNP: did they win in 2007 and again in 2011 because support for independence was on the rise, or did they win because they were a more credible alternative to Labour? Secondly, the future of Scotland in the UK depends very much on whether or not significant sections of the Scottish people are prepared to support Labour.

In my view, the hapless Ed Miliband has done little to convince me that his Labour government would be qualitatively different from the last Labour Government. In fact, given his recent announcements on a range of issues from his support for Tory cuts, to his compliance with the wider Tory narrative about welfare reform, I am not even convinced that his government would be qualitatively different from the Conservative/Lib Dem Coalition, although I would not take the ultra-leftist view that there is no difference. But the difference is increasingly shrinking. The Labour right, organised as Progress (a party within a party) are still very much in control of both the Labour Party and its discursive narrative. I cannot see that changing anytime in the near future.

The people of Scotland have a big decision to make next year. It pleases me that so many are undecided. It means that they are still thinking things through. But as I think about next year and what lies ahead the question on my mind is this; is the Scottish people’s experiment with the SNP a mere flirtation or we are going to follow the road of voting SNP through to its logical conclusion? As I said at the start of this essay, in all honesty, I don’t think that Scotland will become an independent nation in 2014. We are just too conservative (small C) for our own good. Having said that, I hope I am wrong.

References

Hassan, G, (2009), The Modern SNP: From Protest to Power

Hassan, G, and Shaw, E (2012), The Strange Death of Labour Scotland

 

 

Other articles by Gary Fraser in The Point can be found here