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The North is rising

May 6

Posted by Dom in Constitution, Culture, Democracy, Economy, Environment, Europe | Comments off

I’ve been somewhat sceptical as to some of the overtures being made toward the Nordic countries by the SNP, though their engaging with the prospect of a Nordic Scotland keeps them a step ahead of the Labour party who ideologically might be the expected natural proponents of such a project. The leadership of the SNP itself remains coy about the big scary tax word which overshadows  the Nordic debate – a colleague of mine remarked that every single debate and panel discussion they have been involved in on Nordic economy has inevitably ended with the depressing assertion that you’d never get people to agree to even minor tax increases.

It is then particularly welcome that a group of academics, not Holyrood researchers, have come up with a blueprint for taking Scotland to a new developmental level which it could never possibly achieve under existing Labour, Conservative or SNP policy. The basics are reported here in the Herald, and some of the central pillars of Nordic economy and welfarism have been covered here on Better Nation.

It presents a rather interesting challenge to the constitutional referendum, in that it is a vision for Scotland which has not been directly produced by the Scottish National Party. The usual tendency is for any government or party-produced document to be dismissed as selective propaganda, and often with good reason. You’ll struggle to find a government policy primer in either Westminster or Edinburgh that would hold up to some critical peer review.

What the SNP need to get used to is the idea that Yes Scotland is not a vehicle for SNP policy but for the harnessing of a national appetite for change and innovation. It has improved considerably from when it was first conceived and is starting to find its own voice, which can only be a good thing and which will help to dismantle the myth that an autonomous parliament in Edinburgh is the sole intellectual property of the skirts and suits in the Holyrood tower. The job of the SNP is, after all, to govern the country well with the powers they have. It is up to people to decide what the country could and should look like in the future. A non-governmental vision for an independent state is exactly the kind of thing needed to articulate the opportunity afforded by a small state with a robust and transparent democratic process.

The march of the ‘kippers as the revenge of Yes to AV

May 4

Posted by James in Democracy, Westminster | 4 Comments

Yum! Kippers!The Alternative Vote referendum in 2011 was one of the most cynical episodes in modern British politics – very few of its notional supporters much liked AV, almost all its opponents preferred First Past The Post for perceived selfish political advantage, and the minor point of representative principle which this change would have made was barely discussed.

The Tories in particular objected because they feared AV would make an outright majority permanently beyond them, and that they’d have to deal again with the Lib Dems in 2015 if they wanted to stay in office, a strange concern given how small an obstacle the yellows have proved to the Tories’ promotion of a hard-right economic agenda.

The logic of the Tory opposition also assumed that those people who still plan to vote Lib Dem (for reasons most people find hard to ascertain) would have given their second preference to Labour, and that Labour second preferences in Lib-Dem/Tory marginals would flow to Team Clegg despite their coalition record.

The first of these ideas is less plausible than the second, given that the residual Lib Dem voters are hardly the left of the 2010 cohort of Lib Dem voters. No matter. The partisan calculation in Tory Central Office was of a divided centre-left and a united (Tory) right. No more.

For all that the ‘kippers are undoubtedly correct to say that they will have led some to vote who would have abstained, and for all that some UKIP votes have come from non-Tory parties, the fact is that the march of Farage’s ragtag army disproportionately splits the vote on the right, and that most UKIP voters would be likely to have put the Tories second in 2015 had the AV vote passed. There’s no principled satisfaction here from seeing the Tory maths collapse, merely schadenfreude at the irony. Without UKIP voters’ second preferences, that second Cameron term now looks much less likely, despite the growing realisation that Ed Miliband will flounder in the heat of a proper election campaign. And Britain, with or without Scotland, will still have a grossly unrepresentative Parliament elected under rules that belong in the 19th century, not the 21st. Regrets? Surely the Prime Minister is starting to have a few.

Over your cities Green grass will grow

Apr 19

Posted by Dom in Activism, Democracy, Environment, Governance, Holyrood, Ideology, Parties, Society, Westminster | 1 Comment

The Labour party have looked about them, taken stock of the post-Blair wasteland and identified the enemy. which apparently is those well-known destroyers of democracy and oppressors of the common people in the Scottish Green Party.

At Scottish Labour Conference in Inverness this weekend there will be a fringe event entitled ‘Green Splinters’, staged with the express aim of finding out why some people have realised that they would rather vote Green instead of Labour.

Labour peer Lord Bassam, who I am told by Sooth Folk has a flatteringly obsessive distaste for the Greens, tweeted: ‘In Inverness to discuss countering the Green threat to progressive politics.’. It is hard to think of a more obtuse statement given the situation that many people in England find themselves in. I have no idea how much Lord Bassam knows about Scottish politics or the Scottish Green Party, but I would wager that it is significantly less than he thinks.

The Green vote is not a strictly socialist vote, and it is not an anti-Labour vote. The Green vote is a vote for people actually doing their jobs with competence and enthusiasm, and for an ability to bring new ideas into an intellectually moribund arena. Green politics is socialist in certain aspects, normatively seen it embodies the values and aims of social democracy, but it is marked above all by its ability and tendency to challenge institutions from a citizen-based democratic perspective.

Green politics in Germany is a case in point. The German Green Party as it now exists was born from a coalition of environmental and democratic organisations instrumental in the downfall of the German Democratic Republic, combined with the West German Green Party. After first breaking into German regional parliaments, in the late 1990s it provided crucial support to an SDP government looking to form a parliamentary majority.

In Sweden too the Greens have been able to pick up votes from the intellectual middle class and disillusioned former supporters of agrarian and socially liberal parties where those parties have drifted to the right. They often get a hard time from the officially socialist and social-democratic parties respectively, but for the maths to work it is actually in the interests of the red left to work with the Green left in order to form workable governments, rather than expend resources trying to exterminate them and claim 45 per cent of the vote and a lifetime in opposition.

Now the fact that this event is even taking place caused a squeal of delight amongst many in the SGP because it means that the Greens have gone from being a party nobody in politics cared about to one which is obviously threatening the hegemonies enjoyed by institutionalised Labour and unimaginative nationalism.

It would, however, be sad if the Labour party were to decide that keeping the Greens at bay were more important than trying to build workable alternative governments at Westminster and Holyrood.

There is also the crucial matter of Labour failing to embrace either electoral reform or the environment to any significant degree. And devolution, childcare reform, progressive taxation and urban planning. We need a future democracy which looks quite different from today, and all tomorrow’s parties should try to work together to make it happen. The Greens have the ideas and they need viable partners to make it happen.

We’d rather be friends than enemies, but if Labour want to be enemies they should consider the fact that it is a civil war they might well lose.

Don’t wrestle pigs in the mud

Apr 11

Posted by James in Constitution, Democracy | 35 Comments

Pig wrestlingAs has been widely noted, the tone of the debate about independence has gradually gone from bad to worse, and yesterday’s heavy-handed legal action against National Collective hasn’t helped at all – ironic, because their own contributions to the debate are typically smart, calmly argued, and creative in just the ways they promised from the start.

Twitter in particular has become incredibly vitriolic, with people on both sides losing the head to partisanship – notably by defending the indefensible on “their own side” or setting up inane “parody” accounts which fail to note that parody goes best with subtle humour, not dull and repetitive bludgeoning.

Sure, that might just be a bubble, and it may well all come down to the doorstep. But there are plenty of politicians on both sides using the same divisive rhetoric, and they’ll be doing it on TV and at hustings as well as on the doorsteps. And I do really think that dismissing Twitter is naive: all the major players from the parties and the campaigns are there, alongside almost all Scotland’s key journalists and enough politically engaged civilians to make a difference. It does help set the tone, and the tone stinks.

Although there are problems on both sides, it’s not that both are offering the same range of messages. Across the whole Yes side, great optimism and inspiring enthusiasm sit alongside vitriolic carping and bile from keyboard warriors. The No campaign’s style is relatively consistent, relying as it does primarily on pretending the SNP are the Yes campaign, and then picking holes in the SNP’s policy positions. They have their bampots online, but fewer of them. Conversely, they have no-one trying to set out an inspiring vision of a future United Kingdom.

Because they don’t need to. And this collective bitter tone, driven by activists on both sides, helps the No camp. All the muddy little squabbling in the letters pages or online turns more undecided voters off the debate. And, given they know what Britain looks like now and they don’t really know what an independent Scotland would look like, that boosts the No campaign. In fact, I’d be surprised if the No campaign’s internal strategy meetings couldn’t be summed up as “go round the country and whip up apathy“.

Specifically, independence polls strongest in working class areas, parts of Scotland which have been let down by the Westminster consensus, but also parts of Scotland where turnout is often lowest. If the No campaign can depress and bore enough of the electorate into abstention, they’ll win. In fact, they’ll win anyway without a change of tone.

The broad Yes side still spend too long getting down and dirty with the minutiae of policy, and all that nitty-gritty risks distracting from The Vision Thing. Whatever SNP policy may be, an independent Scotland won’t necessarily stay in NATO, or keep the pound, or go genuinely 100% renewable, or be a socialist paradise or a tax haven.

The crucial point of this vote is that, for the first time, those who live in Scotland will make all those decisions for themselves. We’re being offered a chance to ditch an unreformable Westminster and be responsible for all our own mistakes and all our own triumphs. Surely that big picture can inspire more effectively than getting into nit-picking with the other side? Because, although both sides share responsibility for the state of the debate, as a former boss of mine once pointed out, don’t wrestle pigs in the mud, because the pig will win and the pig will enjoy it.

Press support, democracy and well resourced media.

Apr 10

Posted by Dom in Culture, Democracy, Economy, Elections, Environment, Equality, Governance, Media | Comments off

Following on from James calling attention to the plight of National Collective and the need for diverse media voices, a link to a post by myself on the Edinburgh based Green media project POST, and a possible solution to Scotland’s democratic deficit.