Gerry Hassan

The Scotsman, May 12th 2012

‘Modernisation’ is one of the defining words of our time, along with ‘legacy’ and ‘journey’. It is a word used by Tony Blair, David Cameron and Alex Salmond.

It is an in-word for those who feel they shape and define the age, change and the world. It has had an interesting trajectory; it was once bright, shiny, confident, swaggering with confidence, impatient with opposition, and believing the future was theirs for shaping.

It became associated with Tony Blair and New Labour; modernisation was about ‘the project’ and ‘the narrative’; it was against ‘old Labour’, dinosaurs, vested interests, and ‘the forces of conservatism’.

Modernisation was in Blair’s view about optimism and embracing globalisation as a force of liberation. This was ‘an unstoppable force’ and one for which he had no time for opposition, putting it to the 2005 Labour conference that people who wanted ‘to stop and debate globalisation’ might as well ‘debate whether autumn should follow summer’: an elemental view of the change sweeping the globe.

New Labour’s reactionary politics might be obvious to most now, but it did for a period pre and post-1997 open up new questions. There was an awareness that Labour had to change and understand aspiration, transform public services, look at the role of civil society, and challenge the conservatism of trade unions.

Modernisation slowly became stuck in a time warp, of Labour leadership distrust and detesting of the traditions of ‘the Labour movement’ and trade unions. Thus, from an early point, Labour modernisers would rail against the ‘producer interests’ of unions and public sector workers, but as they marketised and outsourced services, not one of the New Labour generation ever acknowledged the threat of ‘corporate interests’, from the likes of KPMG, PwC and McKinsey, the new insiders of the Blairite world.

New Labour’s modernisation became a caricature of anything progressive. Instead, it degenerated into an adoration of big business, accountancy and consultancy firms.

The track record on this is conclusive: PFI/PPP, foundation hospitals, academy schools, and tuition fees. The entire logic of the Cameron administration on the public sector, and English NHS reform, free schools and the whole ‘choice agenda’ derives from Blairism.

The electoral success of New Labour and its presiding triumphantly over the political agenda, both fascinated opponents and in particular David Cameron and Alex Salmond, and gave them a model to emulate and challenge.

Cameron’s fixation with Blair and New Labour is well documented, but Alex Salmond’s and the SNP is less examined. In Salmond’s first stint as SNP leader he repositioned the party unequivocally with a ‘social democratic identity’. Then when the party ran its ‘A Penny for Scotland’ campaign in the first Scottish Parliament election, and was outmanoeuvred by Labour, it adopted a less explicitly tax and spend stance.

Modernisation for the SNP has meant the same ‘Big Tent’ politics and way of seeing the world, and of attempting to claim that mantle from Scottish Labour. They could not be the cheerleaders of modernisation in George Kerevan’s words because of its unholy alliance of ‘conservative Scottish lawyers plus assorted ex-local government leaders linked to the quangocracy’.

The case for independence became focused on economic and business grounds and tax competition. This is where the ‘arc of prosperity’ vision pre-crash emerged, joining together Nordic social democracy with the Irish vision of lowering business taxes.

More widely the way public services are seen has become dominated by the Crawford Beveridge-Richard Kerley worldview of managerialism, challenging ‘entitlement culture’ and charging for services. Social justice has become less and less explicit.

Modernisation may once have had its attractions but it has increasingly become the ethos of the new conservatism: of the world as it is seen from the top floors of the Shard, the City of London and corporate organisations.

SNP modernisation follows the same broad mix as New Labour: a language of progressivism, social democratic populism to keep the base happy and centre-left commentators, along with free market economics. And like New Labour there has been an embrace of ‘Big Beast’ men, the Murdochs, Trumps and Goodwins of our day.

This has taken us as academic Ben Jackson explores in a challenging piece in ‘Renewal’ journal on Alex Salmond as a moderniser to the current situation where the SNP presents independence as more continuity than change involving maintaining monetary union with the rest of the UK and retaining the Bank of England as Scotland’s lender of last resort.

Fascinatingly, Salmond (born 1954) is of the same generation as Tony Blair (1953) and Gordon Brown (1951), the three most successful post-Thatcherite politicians of their generation, and all born in Scotland. And yet they have all been defined by the retreats of the left in the 1980s, and the failed prospectus of modernisation.

Modernisation is a dead-end for progressives and the centre-left. It is not as the late Philip Gould, architect of New Labour, claimed about the belief that ‘every voice had an equal worth, with an equal right to be heard’. Modernisation is about the exact opposite to that, in an almost Animal Farm like manner. It has become about a narrow prism of the voices of the powerful, the quasi-businesses of today’s global giants and their bloviator apologists in public life.

I once many years ago bought into the moderniser view of the world but it hasn’t delivered instead regressing into reactionary ideas. Its jargon of ‘evidence based policy’ and ‘what matters is what works’ has disguised its ideological straightjacket, and that it hasn’t created the bright new dawn it promised.

Modernisation was characterised by Tony Blair’s panglossian hope and optimism, but it has produced anxiety, doubt, insecurity and pessimism, of change being ‘done’ to us by powerful economic forces. It is one voters across the developed world increasingly don’t buy into, and when they have a say, as in France and Greece, reject.

Its dominance has lasted so long because the political elites have bought into it and because of the absence of a credible alternative. Yet that is beginning to change as the paucity of the moderniser’s world becomes apparent. The challenge is to articulate a post-modernised politics without falling into the trap of traditionalists and old vested interests.

This is a terrain as yet unclaimed in Scotland. Self-government and the appeal of the SNP has had a distinct moral dimension based on a revulsion at some of the actions of the British state and a sense we can do things better. Time for a new Scots communitarianism perhaps?

Gerry Hassan

May 8th 2012

It has been a dramatic few months in Scottish politics and one which reveals something about our nation and its public life. We have a problem with how we do politics, public conversation and understand power. There is an inability, or more accurately, unwillingness across large swathes of Scottish society, from our political classes and institutional forces to even many of the radical and alternative voices, to confront some of the difficult issues we have to.

This pattern has been evident for decades, but it has become more and more clear with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and election of SNP Government, first as a minority in 2007, then as a majority in 2011. This is because each of these events upped the stakes about the rhetoric and expectations of change and has illuminated more dramatically the silences, omissions and collusions across Scottish public life.

In this essay I want to explore this general thesis with reference to three recent examples which shed light on this: Rupert Murdoch, the independence referendum, and Rangers FC. I will then explore some of the limitations of Scottish public life, politics and democracy and what can realistically be done in a manner which enriches the prospects for self-government.

Murdoch, BSKyB, the Debasement of British Democracy and Alex Salmond

The unfolding Rupert Murdoch/News Corp scandal is as Peter Oborne has written, a ‘defining story of our age’ (1). For three decades the British political classes at the highest level prostituted themselves at the court of the Sun King; as if in some Hollywood blockbuster morality tale each subsequent Prime Minister pushed it further about how far they could debase their moral compass and profess their fidelity to Murdoch senior: first, Thatcher, second, Blair and Brown, and then finally, Cameron.

This brings us to the BSKyB takeover bid of last year: a move widely seen by many as something that if successful would be a watershed in public life and media plurality. In the summer of 2011 the UK came within a whisker of institutionalising the forces of manipulated, truncated politics and post-democracy (2). We were only saved from this by a sequence of events in which the bravery and commitment of a few individuals needs to be recognised, most notably ‘The Guardian’s’ Nick Davies and Tom Watson, Labour MP. At this crucial point we now realise thanks to the 163 pages of emails released by News International to Leveson, that Alex Salmond wanted and attempted to discuss the BSkyB takeover with Jeremy Hunt at the point he was to take a quasi-judicial decision, to indicate his support for the bid.

Alex Salmond’s explanation of this has been that he supported BSkyB’s bid in the interests of ‘jobs and investment’ and that it secured several hundred jobs north of the border. It isn’t a very plausible defence, for if it had been the raison d’etre of the administration wouldn’t this policy and its success have been trumpeted? Instead, it remained a secret policy unknown to public, SNP politicians and members.

This crucial set of events has proved the main topic of two First Minister’s Questions, but has been downplayed in public life and the mainstream media. It has for understandable reasons been met by silence by SNP politicians, but what is more revealing is the response of independent minded independistas, the kind of ‘critical friends’ the SNP needs to listen to and cultivate if it is to win an independence referendum.

One such source commented that they didn’t say anything in public because ‘I do not want to give succour to a Scottish Labour Party viscerally anti-SNP’ (3). Another reflected that the silence was a product of a variety of factors, making the observation that ‘the Canny Salmond lens is one through which too much commentary and calculation is refracted’. They went on, ‘To question Salmond is to put the cause in question, and accordingly he must be defended against all reasonable political criticism, with puritanical zeal’ (4).

The Referendum Question, Independence, Fear and Disinformation

The bringing to the foreground of the referendum issue has brought all sorts of misinformation and caricatures into the public domain. There has been just to give a few recent examples, ‘The Economist’s’ legendary ‘Skintland’ cover (5); ‘Scotland on Sunday’ proclaiming ‘Independent Scotland a ‘terror risk’’ (based on an article by a Labour MSP) (6); while Lord Fraser was caught claiming than an independent Scotland might force England into dramatic military action which could include having to ‘bomb Scottish airports to defend itself’ (7).

Instead of just rejected the above ridiculous claims (which we also need to do), we need to understand why this is happening. First, part of mainstream Scotland just doesn’t understand the dynamic of nationalist Scotland, and independence brings up all kinds of fears and anxieties which defy logic and rationale. Second, there is the role of the mainstream media in legitimising and strengthening such perspectives by continually giving voice to them to the point that they are acting as vehicles for active disinformation. This isn’t to pose what is going on as some black and white unionist conspiracy; it is more emotive and primordial than that: this is about part of Scotland being threatened and failing to empathise with another element of mainstream society.

Then there is the substance of some of the arguments; ‘The Economist’ gave what it thought were four key problems with independence: the over dominance of oil and gas, doubts over renewables, the weakness of the financial sector post-crash, and the issue of a currency. These are all legitimate points, and apart from detailed discussion, they require a strategic answer articulating the main advantages of an independent Scotland which would look something like: an enhanced international profile, a nuclear free nation, developing a different economic set of priorities from the City of London, and tackling and prioritising poverty and social justice in our country. A contributory factor in the current debate and misinformation has been the combination of a vacuum on independence, with any detail we currently have presented as continuity by the SNP leadership (Crown, currency etc). That will have to change.

Trouble in Govan: Glasgow Rangers and Scottish Football

In terms of measuring by passions and emotions arguably the biggest story of the year in Scotland so far has been the controversy surrounding Rangers FC. This has been building for several years due to Rangers unsustainable spending under David Murray and the level of debt he inflicted on the club; these very public actions were ones that no part of the mainstream media, football, business or otherwise, held Rangers to account for. Even former ‘Times’ sports writer, Graham Spiers, who has bravely challenged the club on its sectarian traditions and practices, did not venture into the terrain of Rangers toxic finances pre-crash.

Since the Rangers house of cards came crashing down when the club went into administration in February 2012, the media have talked about Rangers troubles, but Spiers previous comment of the perils of ‘succulent lamb journalism’ holds true; a case made more powerful by the reach of Channel 4’s Alex Thomson who has ventured into areas uncharted by the Scots media (8), and the ‘Rangers Tax Case’ website (9).

When the SFA recently came out with suggested penalties for Rangers for what has been called by Mike Wade amongst others, ‘a decade [of] effectively cheating’ (10), the reaction of Rangers fans was one of apoplexy and moral outrage, a feeling of mass indignation and victimhood that they were being unfairly singled out. This episode crystallised the two prevailing media accounts of the Rangers case. The first was encapsulated by Stuart Cosgrove when he said ‘no one club is more important than sporting integrity’ (11); the other by Douglas Fraser who commented that ‘Scottish football needs a successful Rangers’ (12).

The real culprits in the game are not people like Cosgrove and Fraser who have made thoughtful contributions across Scottish life, but the mock populist sports commentators who debase much of our media content. The reality of ‘Scottish football needs Rangers’ no matter the cost or preparedness to abandon principle is similar to the ‘too big to fail’ view which brought banking and the country to its knees. Michael Johnston, chair of Kilmarnock, showed his clear sense of the SPL clubs moral compass, commenting, ‘The clubs are mindful of a sporting integrity aspect but the commercial benefits may outweigh that’. Alex Thomson has pointed out that Scottish football is at a crossroads: allowing a tainted, toxic, hated Rangers into the SPL or holding people to account for cheating. We can guess which way things will go, but as Thomson writes, imagine a different world where ‘Scottish football is about sport, sporting values – integrity, morality, justice’ (13). And then look at today’s Scottish football and those who collude with it.

Fight the Power: The Prevalence of ‘Undemocracy’ and ‘Unspace’

The examples of Rupert Murdoch, the referendum and Rangers reveal some important characteristics about Scottish society and the media in particular. They shows us that we have a strange, convoluted relationship to power and those who exercise it, which can be characterised as a complete lack of curiosity and inquisitiveness. This is paradoxical for a nation which prides itself on its radical past and imagination, and which produced such bestsellers as Tom Johnston’s ‘Our Noble Families’, published over a century ago, which sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

We live in a culture where power is rarely held to account. This is a place where proper investigative journalism seems to barely exist; yet some people go through the motions telling themselves that they are the people’s tribunes. An example of this is the BBC Scotland documentary, ‘Rangers: The Inside Story’ which did break the story that Craig Whyte had been debarred from being a company director for seven years and had not disclosed this when he bought the club in the summer of 2011 (14). That though was the sole revelation in a documentary which missed most of the story; in particular it missed that Ticketus had bought the rights to future season ticket sales thus financing Whyte’s purchasing of the club. This sensational news only became fully public post-administration; it has been alleged by some that these documents were available to the BBC for its programme, but were not discovered or understood (15). Sadly, despite this the same team are as we speak producing a forthcoming BBC documentary, which they think will get to the core of the issue, but will on past precedent, get nowhere near.

The Murdoch, referendum and Rangers examples could be joined by many others; the collusion with the banking sector and courting of Fred Goodwin and others pre-crash by our entire political class; then there was the grotesque case of Donald Trump and his vandalising of the sand dunes of Menie which the political establishment responded to (Greens exempted) by declaring ‘Scotland open for business’. A rare exception to our absence of curiosity and challenge has been Anthony Baxter’s award winning film documenting Trump, ‘You’ve Been Trumped’ (16), a film refused any funding by Creative Scotland and barred from a showing at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

We aren’t where we are by accident; it is a product of the power and reach of institutional Scotland, and its creation of a culture of conformity and consensus. Scotland has been a land run by committees of the great and good, and shaped by ‘undemocracy’, an absence of the culture, memory and practice of democracy, and instead chararacterised by the ubiquity of ‘unspace’, public and private spaces characterised by institutional sclerosis, fear of risk taking and independent mindedness; good examples of this would be the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the plethora of public affairs conferences and events.

What can we realistically do about this? First, we can’t continue to be silent about the culture of silences and omissions. We have to name it and talk about it and bring into public the institutional silences and collusions.

Second, we have to get the self-government movement to learn that it needs to have critical dialogues and critical friends. Scotland isn’t going to embark on meaningful, long-lasting change through a top down command and control party model which stifles debate and dissent.

Third, we have to encourage and nurture public debate to be more nuanced. The self-government movement has a responsibility here, and the cybernat community at its worst have to be seen as part of an unhealthy black and white Scotland. At the same time, one can only understand the cybernat obsessions as part of this wider picture, and not solely focus on them as Carol Craig did recently (17). The endless stories of unionist misinformation and scare stories, and the over the top anti-Nationalist rhetoric of Labour in particular, are also part of the same distorted debate which diminishes our democracy.

Fourth, following on from this the language of our public debate has to develop beyond the simplicities of a binary Scotland, unionist v. nationalist, the status quo v. independence. It isn’t just that there are several possible Scottish futures; but that the language of this closed conversation involves name-calling, labelling and a fixed mindset which is profoundly conservative.

Finally, and crucially, how we imagine and understand power has to change. We have to stop thinking just of public Scotland, but address the much more significant and potent ‘iceberg Scotland’ which exists under the waves and away from scrutiny. This means that how we think of politics and political change itself has to alter; for too long this has been about the Parliament and politicians with change reduced to the Parliament gaining more powers, and independence shrunk to the Parliament having the ‘full powers’ of a ‘normal nation’. This is the continued story of Scotland’s enlightened elites, maintaining their position, governing over us, and minimalising the potential of any change.

Additionally, we have to recognise that Scotland’s experience is part of a wider British and global story. The British state over the last 30 years has become institutionalised as a neo-liberal state, part of ‘the global kingdom’ and an advocate for the global class who live and pass through the UK. The Scottish public realm has proven more immune to the charms of this worldview, but all political parties and mainstream politicians have compromised with the market fundamentalist perspective. Nearly every economic, social or cultural policy debate in Scotland bears the imprint of instrumental neo-liberalism, marginalisation of alternative voices, and truncating of public debate (18).

Self-government has to be a democratising process and project, or it will produce a change in name only which won’t affect the lives and experiences of Scottish people. That entails nourishing a culture which is both honest and humble, respecting different viewpoints and challenging vested interests. This is an intricate balancing act, one which involves changing the public culture of Scotland, and aiding an ecology of self-government and self-determination which allows for this sort of thinking, discussion and debate to take place. For this to happen we have to acknowledge the long revolution that Scotland has been on, and the powerful hold of ‘undemocracy’ and ‘unspace’. We have to stand up to power, while digging deep into our capacity to be generous, hopeful, imaginative, and playful and create the Scotland of the future today.

As the old order of the last 30 years of British politics collapses even large parts of the British political class attempt to flee the wreckage of criminality, deceit and blackmail that was the modus operandi of the Murdoch empire. Scotland cannot allow itself to be the last place on earth run as some Murdoch fiefdom, our politicians happy to do his bidding and our football unable to have any moral backbone for fear of losing Sky TV money. Instead, it is an age for being bold and throwing off the legacy of cautious Scotland, while standing up to the bullyboys of crony capitalism. And at the minimum we have to start talking about this.

Notes

1. Peter Oborne, ‘The Murdoch and News Corporation scandal wasn’t about Conservative Party sleaze – but it is now’, Daily Telegraph, May 2^nd 2012, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/leveson-inquiry/9241162/The-Murdoch-and-News-Corporation-scandal-wasnt-about-Conservative-Party-sleaze-but-it-is-now.html

2. Anthony Barnett. ‘Murdoch and the Big Lie’, Open Democracy, May 4^th 2012, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/murdoch-and-big-lie

3. Private communication, April 30^th 2012.

4. Private communication, May 3^rd 2012.

5. The Economist, ‘It’ll cost you: Scottish independence would come at a high price’, April 13^th 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21552564; Gerry Hassan, ‘The Price of Independence: Scotland and the UK according to the Free Marketeers’, April 13^th 2012, http://www.gerryhassan.com/blog/the-future-has-been-pre-ordinated-scotland-and-the-uk-according-to-the-free-market-revolutionaries/

6. Gareth Rose, ‘Independent Scotland a ‘terror risk’, Scotland on Sunday, April 29^th 2012, http://www.scotsman.com/scotland-on-sunday/politics/independent-scotland-a-terror-risk-1-2263860

7. Huffington Post, ‘Scottish Independence: England would ‘bomb Scottish airports to defend itself’ Lord Fraser warns, March 13^th 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/03/13/scottish-independence-england-would-bomb-scottish-airports-to-defend-itself_n_1341629.html

8. Alex Thomson, ‘When Succulent Lamb is on the Menu: Serious Questions are Off’, Channel 4 News, March 19^th 2012, http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view/succulent-lamb-menu-questions/1010

9. Rangers Tax Case: http://rangerstaxcase.wordpress.com/

10. Mike Wade, ‘Questions over grey areas of US millionaire’s bid to buy Blues’, The Times, May 4^th 2012.

11. Channel 4 News, April 17^th 2012.

12. BBC News, April 17^th 2012.

13. Alex Thomson, ‘This is the time for leadership from Scottish football’, Channel 4 News, May 6^th 2012, http://blogs.channel4.com/alex-thomsons-view/time-leadership-scottish-football/1392

14. BBC One Scotland, ‘Rangers: The Inside Story’, October 20^th 2011.

15. On these documents see: Rangers Tax Case, ‘Reflections on Craig Whyte’s Secrecy’, June 7^th 2011, http://rangerstaxcase.wordpress.com/2011/06/06/reflections-on-craig-whytes-obsessive-secrecy/

16. ‘You’ve Been Trumped’ film details at: http://www.youvebeentrumped.com/youvebeentrumped.com/THE_MOVIE.html

17. Carol Craig, ‘‘What does it profit a man …?’ Why the SNP leadership need to do something about the Cybernats’, April 15^th 2012, http://www.centreforconfidence.co.uk/carolsblog.php?p=aWQ9ODM3

18. Nick Couldry, Why Voice Matters: Culture and Politics after Neo-Liberalism, Sage 2010.

Gerry Hassan

May 7th 2012

The story of the recent Scottish elections was clear and unambiguous: voters are returning home to Labour and the SNP honeymoon is over. All of this is magnified in the Glasgow result: Labour holding or as most of the media interpreted it ‘gaining’ back the city it had briefly lost.

All of this ‘analysis’ was done with no breakdown of the Scottish local election party share of the vote; no doubt we will have to wait until David Denver’s research several months down the line for this.

Despite the preponderance of Glasgow in political and media spin there has also been no detailed breakdown of vote changes in Scotland’s biggest city. This short piece provides that analysis and is done not to claim that the city speaks for Scotland but merely to offer the actual figures for debate and wider understanding.

First lets take party share of vote (Table One). Labour won 47.91% of the vote to the SNP’s 31.76%. This represents an increase in the Labour vote of 4.6% and for the Nationalists of 7.18%: amounting to a swing of 1.29% from Labour to the SNP.

Second if we look at the real change in actual votes of people rather than percentages a more complex picture emerges. All the parties lost votes in Glasgow on Thursday but some lost more votes than others (see Table Two).

Labour’s vote across the city fell from 81,393 to 67,612, a decline of 13,781; the SNP’s vote from 46,185 to 44,827, a fall of 1,358; these represent falls of percentage wise 16.93% for Labour from 2007 and 2.94% for the SNP.

The Lib Dem vote fell by 10,643 representing a collapse of 71.60% from five years ago. However, if you think the voter rejection of the Lib Dems is marked, spare a thought for the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity who once combined as a powerful electoral force. The former lost 83.5% of their previous vote, but this was easily surpassed by the latter, Solidarity who lost an impressive 93.0% of their 2007 vote.

Then there were the forces of ‘Glasgow First’, mostly made of former Labour councillors, who won a mere 2,544 votes with 20 candidates giving them a miniscule 1.80% of the vote.

Therefore the Glasgow local elections, like Scotland overall, paint a rich, complicated picture last Thursday, but one the media didn’t spend time exploring. Instead, it went with the by-lines and clichés of their own simplifications, spinning about the ‘spin’ of party politicians as much of what passes for contemporary media analysis does.

Labour won Glasgow and polled relatively well versus expectations and its opponents. The Nationalists walked into a trap mostly of their own making. Yet it is also true that the pattern of Labour’s success in Glasgow does not provide a basis for Labour’s fightback. Labour’s success was based on getting a significant part of its existing vote out in a declining turnout: a ‘base’ strategy which paid the party a decent dividend last week but doesn’t offer much for the future.

What Labour did do was two things; one it managed the war of expectations and outmanoeuvred an over-reaching SNP; second, it has as Johann Lamont recognised post-election engaged in a successful defensive blockade which has bought it time. Labour has been ‘running on empty’ in terms of resources and ideas post-2011 election and it has despite this managed to blunt the SNP advance.

The lessons for the SNP are complex. They have a Glasgow/West of Scotland problem which is deep seated, 2011 apart. The threshold they have they have to cross has been lowered by the weakening of the Labour voting bloc across a range of socio-economic characteristics. Yet at the same time winning in Glasgow has been made more difficult by the decline of the Tories. To put this in perspective when Labour previously lost control of Glasgow council in 1968 and 1977, the Nationalist vote percentage wise was much as it is now; then the city had a multi-party politics with a strong Tory presence. Today with two big parties such levels of support leaves the Nationalists significantly behind Labour.

Finally, an observation about the mainstream media’s role. We need more than following headlines and spin; that doesn’t amount to much of a contribution to the democratic debate. The Glasgow story is a fascinating one; it holds lessons and challenges for all Scotland’s parties. It was a story the media choose not to tell.

Gerry Hassan

The Scotsman, May 5th 2012

London is ‘the world city’ of these isles, a place which attracts and pulls talents from across the UK and the world: on a par with New York, Paris and Tokyo.

Yet the London love-in of our political classes, media and business elites is fast pushing things to breaking point.

We have had to endure Boris v. Ken as if it were a national contest, and this week the militarisation of the London Olympics and Heathrow chaos have dominated the airwaves.

As UK politics and society increasingly fragment and become more diverse, the London classes have dramatically narrowed their notion of the UK to their golden city. London has increasingly become the UK and sometimes even reduced further to the concerns of the narrow corridor of Westminster and the City of London.

The Olympic military operation signifies a fundamental change in how Britain puts on big occasions. We have seen a full-scale military exercise, ‘Operation Olympic Garden’ across the city. In summer, 13,500 troops will be deployed along with RAF Typhoons, helicopters, Royal Marine snipers, surface to air missiles on civilian buildings, and the Royal Navy’s biggest ship, HMS Ocean.

A total of £1 billion will be spent on Olympic security, Scottish Police will contribute hundreds of police, and Strathclyde Police will spend £3 million of public money on the games. All to aid London achieving a military security lockdown unprecedented in British history.

There has been the saga of Heathrow airport queues with people coming to Britain facing delays of up to four hours. Heathrow missed all its performance targets for non-European travellers last month and the computer system for visa extensions has collapsed. First, the government blamed the weather before conceding something had gone badly wrong. It is still insisting this chaos is nothing to do with UK Border Agency cuts.

Then there is the controversy over the housing benefit cap of £26,000. This is seen as having huge London consequences with Eric Pickles private secretary suggesting 40,000 families might be uprooted from the capital; London councils have suggested up to 250,000 people could be at risk of their homes forcing a mass migration out of the capital. Newham council have offered to place tenants in cheaper accommodation in Stoke-on-Trent, while Westminster have considered moving tenants to Nottingham and Derby.

Public infrastructure across the UK is over concentrated in London according to a recent study by academics John Tomaney and Andy Pike. They identified the £10 billion London Olympics, Heathrow Terminal 5 £4 billon spend, and the Channel Tunnel Rail link’s £5 billion as regional spending. Greater London infrastructure investment on airports and rail is an astonishing £45.6 billion, considerably more than that the entire Scottish Government budget.

There is an arrogance and entitlement amongst London’s elites. They openly believe that what is good for London is good for the UK. Take Boris Johnson, newly re-elected mayor of London. In a ‘Huffington Post’ interview last week he said, ‘A pound spent in Croydon is of far more value to the country than a pound spent in Strathclyde’, and went much further, claiming that ‘you will generate jobs in Strathclyde far more effectively if you invest in parts of London’. This is regional trickle down economics; concentrate on those areas doing well and somehow it will spread out to those less well-off.

London is the shining beacon to the free marketeers and trickle down apologists. It has become ‘Londongrad’, a playground for the super rich of the world, for tycoons, playboys and all kinds of dodgy money.

From across the globe, Arab sheiks, Greek millionaires and Russian oligarchs flock to London and its ask no questions mindset. This has produced a whole eco-system of luxury shops, goods and support services to featherbed this overclass.

This ‘world city’ is increasingly diverging from the rest of the country, the real ‘separatism’ that is happening in the UK. Neil O’Brien, head of right wing think tank Policy Exchange has acknowledged this, reflecting that ‘London is like a Potemkin village for visitors; its population does not represent the UK at all’.

The free market vision of London as the epicentre of the rich, successful and internationally mobile, leaves a huge part of the city excluded and with sizeable parts of the population in relative poverty. London might be a ‘world city’ and a Camelot on the hill to some, but it is also the most unequal city in the entire developed world.

Massive government spending and subsidies aid the wealth and money of London. Despite what the free market fantasists say London is the place with the most public spending per head, apart from Northern Ireland. At the same time the London class dare to lecture us on ‘the Barnett Formula’ and portray Scotland as ‘Skintland’.

The increasing concentration of British politics and media on London is a symptom of our manipulated democracy and distorted political system, a culture which increasingly focuses on the interests of the uber-winners and the narrow global classes who inhabit the world of ‘Britain plc’.

Part of the current Scottish debate which is rarely articulated is the influence of how we deal with the unequal island we live on and the power and pull of London. Scotland has institutions and a voice to counter this to some extent, while the North of England is left with little political muscle, reduced to the status of ‘Flyover Britain’.

The fantasy solution to all this would be for London and the South East to declare independence from the rest of the UK and sail out to the mid-Atlantic, to become a new Singapore/Hong Kong, a vision not far removed from Conservative right wing opinion.

What is coming is the anti-London backlash, a reaction across the UK against the insular obsessions of the capital’s super-rich and their apologists. This will be aided by the militarisation of the Olympics, airport chaos and housing benefit changes, and even more the concentration of our politics on London.

This battle will take place in London as well with Iain Duncan Smith’s government department cleaners this week telling him they cannot live on the statutory minimum wage, but need a living wage.

This popular revulsion has been a long time building. London is not the UK, and the London super-rich’s interests are not those of the capital city. Instead, this is a symptom of a rotten economic system, crony capitalism and a society which needs to fundamentally rethink its values.

Gerry Hassan

May 5th 2012

This is a seismic weekend for politics and democracy. There is the French Presidential election and the Greek parliamentary election; therefore we need to put the UK and Scottish local elections in a bit of humble context.

Saying that these were fascinating and complicated elections: Labour’s decent polling, the kicking of the Lib Dems and the narrow triumph of Boris over Ken. In Scotland the first mainstream media reaction has been to emphasise Labour’s performance, question the Nationalist momentum, and talk up the battle for Glasgow.

‘The Herald’ declared, ‘Historic win for Labour as it resists SNP push’ (1); ‘The Scotsman’s’ front-page that, ‘Labour revival as it takes major prizes’ (2). John Curtice, appearing in both these papers and ‘The Guardian’, wrote in ‘The Scotsman’ that, ‘Unionists may conclude that results show the peak of Mr. Salmond’s popularity has passed’ (3).

In the war of spin post-election Labour clearly emerged as the victors, but this disguised that Labour merely did better than the expectations people had, and the SNP less well. To understand what happened we have to look beyond the simplistic media assumptions which are nearly as bad and more reinforcing than the political spin. These elections tell us a number of things about the state of Scottish politics and more broadly our democracy.

The Long Revolution of Scottish Politics

In most accounts we have Labour ‘gaining’ Glasgow, a city they continuously held for 32 years from 1980 until earlier this year when they managed to lose the city from themselves. And the SNP walking into the trap of believing their own hype and believing that their supposed electoral juggernaut would carry all before it.

Labour performed well in Glasgow, became the largest party in Edinburgh and Aberdeen, gained overall control of West Dunbartonshire and Renfrewshire, and made big gains in Fife. The SNP won overall control of Dundee and Angus, and even managed gains in Glasgow and Fife. The SNP won most seats upon which basis they claimed they had ‘won’ the elections; both SNP and Labour gained seats, respectively 61 and 46 seats; while it looks likely that as in 2007 Labour finished narrowly ahead of the SNP in the national vote.

Over-simplistic analysis dominated the immediate post-election environment. This is Iain Martin in ‘The Daily Telegraph’, ‘The real story is that Labour is back not only in Glasgow but in Renfrewshire and Edinburgh too …’ The Salmond surge of last year was now in reverse, ‘Some of those who voted for him last year, but who were not natural Nats, are clearly suffering a spot of buyer’s remorse’ (4). On twitter Martin boiled this down to the following pithy soundbite, ‘’Overall Labour majority in Weegieland. Eck pretending he’s won. Great night for Labour and union’ (5).

Hamish Macdonell put it in a more balanced way, ‘The SNP has not had a bad election’, and, ‘Both Labour and the SNP have risen but Labour has done the better of the two – particularly given that Labour was expected to suffer at the polls this week at the hands of the SNP’ (6).

Two factors. The first is that these elections, their context and post-event hype are all part of Labour’s and the SNP’s struggle for Scotland’s political soul. This is aided by the Con-Lib Dem UK Government and both of these parties now being objects of Scots dislike. In parts of urban Central Scotland, this has happened at the happy conjuncture where voters have nearly run out of Tories to kick.

Second, there is the Glasgow effect. This has several dimensions. One of them is for people to think Glasgow is Scotland, a mini-version of the ‘London is the UK’ perspective. This has been a Scottish election dominated by Glasgow: a city which has only 12% of Scotland’s population.

More crucially is that historically the Nationalists have had a Glasgow/West of Scotland problem. Until 2011 the SNP never broke through in the West, episodic by-elections apart. A critical factor in this has been the mosaic of the West of Labour voting bloc (public sector, more Labour middle class, Catholic vote), all of which weakened in the 2011 elections.

The Nationalists won in 2007 despite only winning four constituency seats in the whole West of Scotland, but this seemed to vanish as a factor in the 2011 landslide. Then the Nationalists outpolled Labour in Glasgow, and numerous Labour citadels fell. Now we don’t know whether 2011 was an exception, and we are back to Labour ‘business as usual’, and that this year’s election are a return to the previous pattern. The reality is I suspect much more complex.

What we do know is that Labour’s hold over its ‘heartlands’ in the long view is weakening. First, take turnout. Glasgow’s turnout was 32%. The lowest voting wards were Anderson/City with 23.6%, followed by Calton at 26.03%’ the first elects Labour leader Gordon Matheson, the second has the worst male life expectancy in all Western Europe.

Six of Glasgow’s 21 wards had turnouts in the 20% range; the highest turnout was Pollokshields with 42.7%, the area that elected the city’s sole Tory, David Meikle. Looking at these ward votes the real pattern of the city becomes clear. In 2007, Labour’s successful candidate in Pollokshields won 2,575; in 2012, 1,828; the SNP’s victorious candidate won 2,057 votes five years ago; now 1,657; interesting Meikle, the solitary Tory won 1,435 in 2007 and 1,674 now.

What this overall tells us is that Labour’s triumph in Glasgow was based on getting more of its vote out, not winning new converts or friends. It got less of its vote out than five years ago, but proportionately more than the SNP. In 2007, Labour won 43.3% in Glasgow to the SNP’s 24.6%; in 2012, both Labour’s and the SNP’s vote in the city increased percentage wise, but in actual voting numbers, both parties saw their support fall.

Some will say Labour’s vote is down compared to five years ago in actual numbers because these are the first stand-alone local elections since 1995. However, the larger picture informs us that something deeper and more significant is going on than the results of one election. Several years ago, James McCormick and Jane Saren looked at the politics of Labour’s support in its heartlands. They found in seat after seat voters were increasingly disconnecting and that in what at first appeared safe seats, Labour were winning with smaller and smaller shares of the electorate. They concluded that there was a ‘fading’ heartbeat in what were seen as Labour’s traditional heartlands (7).

Glasgow has been the outlier in this and the dynamics of this are deep rooted and long term. Analysing voting figures in Glasgow across the entire post-war era, in a forthcoming study of Scottish Labour out next month, a distinct pattern emerges. Between 1951-2011, in actual votes, Tory support in the city has collapsed and is now a mere 4.7% of its strength sixty years ago; that story is at least familiar and well-known. What is less known is the long term atrophying of Glasgow Labour, whose vote now is a mere 23.9% of its 1951 peak. Part of this is that the city’s electorate is smaller, but the biggest factor is turnout collapse, 81% in 1951 and 41% in 2011, while greater party competition is also a factor (8).

Don’t Believe the Hype! Beyond Binary and Linear Politics

The recent Scottish elections have illustrated the perils and pitfalls of buying into immediate, knee-jerk, following the crowd analysis, rather than engaging in actual voting figures, and placing in a longer historical context.

Scottish Labour was never completely dead, but nor does its current performance answer its long-term crises and challenges. The SNP are not the all-conquering vote winning machine of myth. This tells us two important points. Politics isn’t simply binary. Despite the Labour-SNP contest taking the centrestage of Scottish politics, there is more to life north of the border than two parties. Importantly, we are not in a simple win-lose environment between the two; because there are other players, namely the Tories and Lib Dems, both of the big parties can gain or lose. We should also note the permanent fixture of the Scottish Greens who achieved a record 14 councillors on Thursday.

Second, politics never operate in a simple linear pattern. We have been here before with such simplistic expectations; when the SNP won the Glasgow East by-election in 2008, media and popular expectations prepared to anoint the Nationalists in Glenrothes, only for the SNP bandwagon to be halted by a successful, populist Labour campaign. It was always too simple to read the 2012 local elections as Alex Salmond’s next triumph, just as it too much of a caricature now to read them as voters coming ‘home’ to Labour.

These are complex, unpredictable times with voter intentions sometimes difficult to predict; that is hardly surprising given the times we are living through, the challenges and the limits of our political debate. Four observations follow from these elections. First, Labour may have shown signs of life, but its traditional ‘fighting’ talk of opposition won’t take it very far. It is a language of a declining Scotland which will comfort the base and work in elections which can be won speaking solely to your own constituency. Labour still have to confront what has been called, ‘The Strange Death of Labour Scotland;’, namely, not the death of the party, but of the traditional politics which inhabited a vision of society, ‘Labour Scotland’.

Second, the alternative political prospectus, ‘The forward march of Scottish nationalism’ is just as partial as Labour’s vision was at its peak and problematic. The SNP’s constituency’s sense of the tide and power of history blowing behind them and sweeping all before them, doesn’t explain the realities of Scottish politics and most voters. The Nationalists are going to need a more subtle, pluralist and generous strategy if they are to build a majority for independence. They are also going to have to develop a politics which goes beyond talking about constitutional change, think about poverty and social justice, ending the ‘Big Tent’ politics, and making positive choices about which Scotland they speak for.

Third, the state of Scottish democracy. We have to address the ‘missing million’ Scots voters from the Scottish Parliament elections. This part of our nation are generally poorer and younger voters, more connected to Simon Cowell’s ‘The X Factor’ than voting Labour or SNP. The Anderson/City and Calton ward voters in Glasgow and their disconnection is a product of many factors, of long term deindustrialisation, the party as machine politics model, and changes in political and popular culture. Yet this sad world of the truncated democracy, of the electorate reduced to affluent and older voters, the Americanisation of politics, isn’t inevitable; we are away to see this weekend a French Presidential election turnout of 80%, last seen in the UK in the 1950s.

Finally, a wider and perhaps more controversial point. British politics may be broken, its political classes covered in ignominy, and its state in crisis and under the influence of the neo-liberal leviathan, but we cannot assume that Scotland is automatically morally superior. Scottish politics and debate has until recently existed in a culture of ‘undemocracy’, of the managed society and autonomy of the great and good who knew how to keep the populace in place. The transition of Scottish politics from the managerial Scottish Office to Scottish Executive and now Scottish Government has seen the transformation of our public realm and government, but if we are to have a serious debate about the challenges we face, let alone self-government and independence, then we are going to have to bring the democratisation debate centrestage.

That will require talking about the culture of ‘undemocracy’ which still permeates parts of public life, and address the inequalities, exclusions and silences which disfigure too much of our country. Some of the party politicians successful on Thursday and much of the media commentary seem to be content with life in the bubble of the truncated, atrophied democracy, but ultimately this is a world of diminishing returns and participants. We need to aspire to having a more mature, nuanced debate and politics and challenging the orthodoxies and limitations of our age.

Notes

1. The Herald, May 5^th 2012.

2. The Scotsman, May 5^th 2012.

3. John Curtice, ‘Labour wakes up to greet the arrival of a bright new dawn’, The Scotsman, May 5^th 2012.

4. Iain Martin, ‘Ed Miliband has won a stunning and unexpected victory on Scotland. This is good news for the union’, Daily Telegraph, May 4^th 2012, http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/iainmartin1/100156262/ed-miliband-has-won-a-stunning-and-unexpected-victory-in-scotland-this-is-good-news-for-the-union/

5. https://twitter.com/#!/iainmartin1

6. Hamish Macdonell, ‘Labour succeeds in slowing Salmond’s advance’, Spectator Coffee House, May 4^th 2012, http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/7825463/labour-succeeds-in-slowing-salmonds-advance.thtml

7. Jane Saren and James McCormick, ‘The Politics of Scottish Labour’s Heartlands’, in Gerry Hassan (ed.), The Scottish Labour Party: History, Institutions and Ideas, Edinburgh University Press 2004, p.91.

8. Gerry Hassan and Eric Shaw, The Strange Death of Labour Scotland, Edinburgh University Press 2012 forthcoming, p. 209, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Strange-Death-Labour-Scotland-Hassan/dp/0748640029/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336230378&sr=1-3

Gerry Hassan

The Scotsman, April 28th 2012

What a week it has been – Murdoch, Trump, Rangers FC and of course the economy going into double dip recession.

It is all-reminiscent of that last period of acute crisis, a failing, nervous political class and economic instability: the 1970s amplified by Dominic Sandbrook’s excellent current TV series on the decade.

Scottish debate on the economy has for many years been shaped by two contradictory strands. The first has been the power of conventional economics, concerns over our relative economic growth rate compared to the rest of the UK, and the desire to pursue ‘faster, smarter growth’. This has been the policy of all Scottish administrations post-devolution and all four mainstream political parties.

The second has been an aspiration to do economics differently from Anglo-American capitalism and the British economy and state. This has drawn on critiques of economic growth, sustainability and green concerns, and debates around health and well-being.

Post-crash, post-RBS implosion, the Scots political classes, business community and institutional chatter economically has had little to say to chart a way out of the wreckage and find a new course. Instead the unambiguous message has been restoration by stealth across public life.

This week an important contribution to beginning to find and flesh out that alternative was unveiled when Oxfam Scotland launched at the Scottish Storytelling Centre, Edinburgh, before a packed audience, their Humankind Index.

This was put together by Oxfam in association with the Fraser of Allander Institute and the new economics foundation (nef), combining academic rigour with the input of Britain’s consistently most challenging and original think tank.

What it attempts to do is track Scots progress and give a very different measurement to GDP. Scottish people were asked to rate the factors that most contributed to a ‘good life’ and these were then weighed for importance. The results reflected the overwhelming importance of health and housing to respondents.

They found that between 2007-8 and 2009-10 Scotland improved overall by 1.2% reflecting advances in health and housing improvements which compensated for falls in the economy and material well-being.

The index also looks at the picture in Scotland’s most deprived communities and has found that they are 10% behind the national average. The strength of the work is that it looks at different aspects of disadvantage and inequalities, not just material inequality, but at such issues as how people feel, what they think about their community, and how connected they believe they are to others.

What Judith Robertson, head of Oxfam in Scotland, and Katherine Trebeck, who has headed much of the work programme, have made clear is that they want to take forward this work on two levels.

They want to influence government documents such as the National Performance Framework and challenge the blind faith commitment to ‘faster growth’ across government. They also have ambitions to go beyond this: to change the debate, culture, popular aspirations and the very idea of how we think of and measure progress.

Oxfam acknowledge that their work is not perfect. We have incomplete data across a host of areas. Their methodologies in some places are open to debate and challenge. But this is the start of something important, significant and long-term in a week packed with big moments.

GDP is not of course perfect either. Its measurements miss a wide array of human activity and creativity. It includes things which hardly add to the sum total of human happiness. GDP is approaching 70 years old having been institutionalised as a measure of economic progress at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944. Increasingly people have realised using it as a bible as conventional economics has done is not helpful and actually counter-productive.

The limits of GDP even reached David Cameron during his ‘compassionate Conservatism’ phase when he indicated an interest in creating alternative indices addressing GWB (general well-being). Since then the Office of National Statistics (ONS) have looked at producing such a measurement, but have decided not to develop one single index.

All of Scotland’s main parties (the Greens exempted) are committed to a narrow econometric notion of the world, progress and wealth. This has even been the dominant way of thinking about independence in the SNP, but there is some small evidence of an open mind with John Swinney, through Linda Fabiani’s attendance at the launch, welcoming this initiative.

Oxfam are committed to progressing this index in association with others publishing it over the next few years so we can track a different idea of progress to GDP. Trebeck said that ‘the financial crisis provides an opportunity to re-prioritise our goals, focusing on what is really most important to people and what is most influential on our prosperity and sustainability’.

They have already said they will publish local humankind indexes after the forthcoming elections. That is a tantalising prospect: up to 32 alternative ratings telling us where is the best place in Scotland to flourish, not according to jobs, housing or wealth, but through a considered measurement of the quality of life.

This is where the Scottish political and public debate should concentrate: a different kind of economic debate, social justice and a politics which breaks with Westminster’s tired traditions.

That requires a very different kind of conversation informed by a radical vision of the future. And if that is so it points in exactly the opposite direction from this week’s main stories: the double-dip recession, and the fixation of our political leaders with Murdoch, Trump and Rangers FC, symbols of the failed crony capitalism of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

Reducing human beings to the dystopian idea of semi-sovereign consumer individuals has not increased the overall happiness of humanity. Consumerism, shopping and debt-fuelled lifestyles, the beginnings of which are sketched out in Dominic Sandbrook’s guide to 1970s Britain, has just produced a world of mass anxiety, insecurity and fear over keeping up with others or worse keeping your head above water.

We have just been given the beginnings of a debate which could start to shape an alternative Scotland, one where we consciously imagine and create our own collective future and idea of society. Maybe many years from now, if Scotland succeeds in charting a different route, we might remember this week more for that, than for all the hullaballoo about the Murdochs, Trump and Rangers FC.

Gerry Hassan

The Guardian Comment, April 26th 2012

Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, has emerged as a significant player in the Leveson inquiry. This is a result of the release of 163 pages of emails from News Corporation which have publicised the extent of their contacts with the Scottish Government.

The charge is that the Scottish Government were prepared to go into bat for the Murdoch empire as a quid pro quo for ‘The Sun’ supporting the SNP in last year’s elections. This is contested and denied by Rupert Murdoch and Salmond.

What is incontrovertible is that Salmond agreed last March to make a call to Jeremy Hunt, Culture Secretary, to support Murdoch’s BSkyB takeover bid. This call was meant to happen, but didn’t.

To Salmond, this train of events is about the business of promoting Scotland, jobs and investment, as he has commented, ‘arguing for the Scottish interest is what this government does’. At First Minister’s Questions earlier today, he stated, ‘the job of a First Minister is to advocate jobs for Scotland’.

Beyond the accusations and denials, we now know that the Scottish Government last year had a policy of supporting the BSkyB bid, believing in Salmond’s words that it would be ‘good for Scotland’. This official policy was never publically announced, kept secret and only came out yesterday in the avalanche of News Corp emails.

There is a pattern here of modern politics and politicians; Alex Salmond’s courting of Rupert Murdoch follows Thatcher’s ideological love-in with Murdoch. From this New Labour learned to love the Murdoch empire, and subsequently the Cameroon Conservatives and Salmond’s SNP have followed suit.

Salmond’s style of politics seems to involve ‘big beast politics’, of deal making, attracting controversial, charismatic, alpha-males and being impatient or oblivious to the downside of such actions. There is an attraction to wealth and power from Fred Goodwin to Donald Trump (giving evidence to the Scottish Parliament yesterday against wind farms in light of his relationship with Salmond going sour), and Rupert Murdoch.

The actions of Salmond and the SNP are what modern, successful parties do. New Labour fawned at each of these figures as well, as have the Tories. The SNP like New Labour at its peak are a ‘big tent’ coalition, from corporate interests to social democracy.

Rupert Murdoch has said that Alex Salmond is ‘an amusing guy’ and that he is ‘interested in the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment and intrigued by the idea of Scottish independence’. The latter is well known and seen as possible payback for a perfidious British political class now are eager to spurn him. His interest in the Scots Enlightenment has so far evaded any students of Murdoch’s media output.

Alex Salmond will probably escape from this latest episode, aided by the weakness of his Scottish opponents. Labour’s leader north of the border, Johann Lamont did well today in their parliamentary exchanges, showing a genuine moral indignation, without landing a killer punch. A more likely outcome for Alex Salmond unless he changes course is that the slow drip of his infatuation with ‘big beasts’ along with a lack of serious party opposition will gradually diminish him: the way it did Blair.

Scottish self-government has been shaped by a belief that Scotland can govern itself, mobilise resources and do better than the British state with its record of Afghanistan and Iraq, market fundamentalism and a broken political class.

That is still true, and up until now it has been aided by a decent, competent government led by a popular leader. The Scottish government and civil service are still, despite the Murdoch saga, not in hock to the corporate classes, outsourcers and vulgarians of Anglo-American capitalism. Scotland’s public services are not being broken up and handed over to private interests. Yet, the events of the last few days show that Salmond has a blind spot to crony capitalism and the manipulated politics and democracy which fed it.

This matters to the crucial debate about Scotland’s constitutional status. The moral dimension in this has become a bit less clear this week and could become even cloudier unless Salmond and the SNP learn some fundamental lessons.

The SNP and self-government forces are going to have to become explicit about their different Scotland, make choices and flesh out a progressive politics. This will entail speaking about a different kind of economy after the Blair-Brown bubble, championing social justice, and practicising a very different politics. A generally well-disposed nation awaits a politics of this terrain, from either the SNP, Labour or other self-government forces, having giving up on the Tories long ago and the Lib Dems in the last year. An alliance with Rupert Murdoch and advocating for his business interests shouldn’t have any part of this.

Gerry Hassan

The Scotsman, April 21st 2012

This week the clock counting down to the London Olympics passed the 100 days to go mark, while the Olympic authorities announced their rigorous social media and Twitter guidelines like a rerun of some Beijing 2008 police operation.

The story of ‘Team GB’ the Olympic football project continues to offer more entertainment, bewilderment and anxiety with a ‘shortlist’ just announced of 80 players. Steven Fletcher, along with David Beckham is apparently included. Next week the draw takes place for the football competition with still a huge number of unsold tickets.

It is ‘Team GB’ that participates in the games, not ‘Team UK’.  The reason for this is shrouded in history. Great Britain was one of only fourteen national teams which competed in the first modern games of 1896 and then in 1908 the name Great Britain and the abbreviation GBR were registered by the Olympic authorities.

This is the conventional story put forward. That a UK which has undergone two World Wars, the loss of Empire and its changing role in the world, couldn’t bring itself to change the 1908 Olympic registration. If so, it says quite a bit about the nature of the UK.

Many will respond by saying this is just one of the many strange anomalies which characterise the UK: the supposed unitary state which has always had a distinctive Scotland since 1707, the fact car number plates are ‘GB’ not ‘UK’, and more importantly, that the UK is not a nation, but a state.

The British Olympic Association (BOA) has offered some convoluted explanations for why it is ‘Team GB’ and not ‘UK’. It has claimed that neither ‘Team GB’ nor ‘Team UK’ are strictly accurate, and offered the explanation that some athletes will not be from GB or UK, coming from the Isle of Man, Channel Isles or one of the many numerous British Overseas Territories.

‘Team UK would not be a completely accurate description’ the BOA commented, ignoring that ‘Team GB’ is even more inaccurate. If you are a Northern Ireland athlete you have the choice of taking part in the British or Irish teams; in the Beijing games, of the nine Northern Irish athletes, six represented Ireland and three GB.

That seemed to work for many of the athletes, but the Northern Irish devolved administration haven’t been to pleased at ‘Team GB’ and formally requested that it be renamed ‘Team UK’ to be more accurate. They were slapped down with the invoking of those dread words, ‘brand reputation’ as if that is an excuse to be inaccurate when it comes to things like this.

This debate has become even more contentious not surprisingly when the issue of football is linked to the long histories of the four national associations, national pride and identity.

The English and Scottish FAs were the first national associations of the world, and the two nations invented the modern game as we know it. The histories of Queen’s Park and the Old Etonians contributed much to how the game evolved, while for a long time for good and ill, Glasgow was with the Spiders and ‘the Old Firm’ the world capital of football.

‘Team GB’ supporters say it will bring people together and be an uplifting collective experience. Gordon Brown and David Cameron may be the usual suspects in this. More surprising was Mick McCarthy, former Republic of Ireland manager, welcoming Scottish players such as Steven Fletcher (currently out of favour with Scots boss Craig Levein) playing in the games.

Its opponents, and in particular many football fans of all four nations, view the whole project suspiciously. Why this and why now they ask? Is it about ‘Team GB’ aspiring to emulate ‘Team USA’?

To many Scots this is about ‘perfidious Albion’ aided by an English FA who have gone against the explicit, unambiguous assurances they gave to the SFA that this would not happen. The Scots were told that an English team would take the part of ‘Team GB’.

This happened in the past when ‘Team GB’ took part and won the 1908 football tournament with the English amateur team in the first London Games. And this is a clue to one of the motivations. Great Britain has taken part sporadically in the games, winning in 1912 again, and then in the second London games of 1948 under the tutelage of the great Matt Busby finishing fourth. There has been no British participation in the final games since 1960 and the qualifying rounds since 1972.

Part of this is an attempt at mobilising a great British feel good factor combining the Olympics with the Diamond Jubilee, and using the London games as a domestic and international promotion exercise.

This has been combined with attempts to browbeat the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish associations into submission. The BOA last year claimed ‘a historic agreement’ of all the football associations; quickly condemned by the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish in a joint statement, reiterating their ‘collective opposition’ to the whole enterprise.

The English FA have consistently misunderstood the anxieties of the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish associations throughout this believing that any threat to their independent status from FIFA is unfounded. What the English have failed to grasp is that a ‘Team GB’ is just as much a threat to a separate English national team; this obvious point hasn’t dawned on them once in the last few years!

Does any of this matter? Isn’t this after all just about sport and football, an activity that many think shouldn’t be in the Olympics in the first place? Will it really matter that much when an ageing, declining David Beckham leads out his team of youngsters in the summer?

Maybe it doesn’t matter as much as some football fans fear. A threat to the four nations independent status isn’t real at the moment. Yet, something more is going on than sport.

A state which doesn’t even know its name, ‘the country formerly known as Great Britain’, as the writer Ian Jack put it, is in a sticky place. ‘Team GB’ represents something which is a fiction and an illusion which doesn’t correspond with any political form.

That says something about the state of the United Kingdom as its athletes prepare to run, jump and swim this summer for one of two national teams. A state filled with uncertainty about its own identity, with rulers who don’t understand where or what it is.

Gerry Hassan

The Scotsman, April 14th 2012

The forthcoming local elections are reduced in most of their coverage to their impact on UK and Scottish politics.

Most attention is focused on the tragi-comedy and pantomime of Boris versus Ken, with even the plethora of local referendums on Mayors across some of England’s cities concerned with what happens to this or that Labour MP.

The only other place that gets a serious look in is the battle for Glasgow, between Labour and SNP for control of the council.

This may not have the box office appeal of Boris and Ken but it still has a lot of hooks. A city with a once dominant Labour tradition now in crisis, and a resurgent SNP hoping it can for the first time win an overall majority. However, in a week when both major parties issued their ‘Glasgow manifestos’ much of this debate can be seen as threadbare or mere positioning.

Glasgow City Council hasn’t had to look for its troubles in recent years. There was the resignation of Steven Purcell as council leader, the dark underbelly of the city and ‘men behaving badly’ it exposed, the dodgy property deals and the explosion of ALEOs (hands off agencies) and the scale of councillor remuneration.

The council, public agencies and businesses face huge challenges: a squeeze on council and public spending, massive issues of economic development, pressures in the jobs market and large parts of the city permanently excluded. The city fathers for years seem to have put their faith in an economic model which looks unsustainable, centred on consumption, culture and tourism.

Glasgow though isn’t, despite the occasional comparison, in crisis like Detroit or declined as far as Liverpool; a more apt comparison would be Boston, a similarly positioned North Atlantic cold water port.

The city still has a sense of swagger and self-promotion; it has endlessly reinvented and reimagined itself over time from ‘second city of Empire’ to ‘second city of shopping’; from the celebrated ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ to the more recent, risible ‘Glasgow: Scotland with Style’.

It is a place rich with stories, folklore and myth. There is the Glasgow of ‘Red Clydeside’, of unpredictable, threatening mass protest, and the more prevalent pseudo-radical version of the city, of pretensions and gesture politics which has had a longer history.

There is in parts an identifiable chip on the shoulder, of thinking the city is patronised by Edinburgh or outsiders. More damaging is the entitlement culture of city authorities. This draws on a rich tradition of Glasgow chauvinism and exceptionalism; one local business leader privately reacted to Perth recently becoming a city by seeing it as a diminution of Glasgow’s big city status.

The other powerful institutional account of the city is that of experts, specialists and technocrats who over the years have unveiled their grand designs from the Bruce Plan onwards.

One of the most influential drivers of this in the last few years has been what is called ‘the Glasgow effect’, identified and defined by Glasgow Centre for Population Health. Their research has shown that the city’s poor health is harmed by poverty, but isn’t solely about that; it is also about culture, behaviour and attitudes.

This has been genuine pathbreaking research which has compared Glasgow with Liverpool and Manchester, finding Glasgow’s public health much worse than it would be just on socio-economic grounds. These ideas have been widely popularised and discussed, including by Carol Craig in her ‘Tears that Made the Clyde’, a book which poses many relevant questions about the city, but does in its attempt to challenge the official panglossian account, paint an overwhelmingly bleak picture.

This sterling work has been motivated by trying to understand and counter the vast generational chasms of inequality which Scotland seems just a little too comfortable living with. However, what it has also done is played into a longer city tradition of administration by experts for experts; part of professional Glasgow believes it has the right to tell poor people what’s good for them.

What such a perspective has missed is that this is a deeply ingrained tradition, and one which exasperates the problems it tries to address. The world of rational experts finding the perfect answer and then implementing it shows a profound naivety and elitism in how government, policy and change work.

The wonderful satire of Stanley Baxter’s ‘Parliamo Glasgow’ was a reaction to this world. Each week his radio series showcased his otherworldly ‘Professor’ coming out of his ivory tower to observe the behaviours and rituals of the local folk. This was a complete send-up of the cod-sociology and voyeurism of some of these accounts at their worst. Sadly we haven’t moved on that far.

What is missing from most accounts of the city is the idea of power and in particular, voice. This latter concept draws from the work of Albert Hirschman’s influential book, ‘Exit, Voice and Loyalty’, where exit represents the actions of consumers wanting change and loyalty, the act of collective solidarity; voice in this account is the action of a diverse, engaged citizenry.

Many activists and campaigners have over the years hoped that when the latest controversy such as a high profile murder or sectarian incident occurs, this would lead to what they call ‘a Rosa Parks moment’. By this they meant a catalyst for a city to wake up and become galvanised that it needed to change.

This forelong hope fails to recognise the context of Rosa Parks. She was not a lone individual. She was a civil rights activist who choose to take her stand on the issue of race segregation in Montgomery, Alabama with a committed organisation behind her to support her. That is the sort of agency and resource that Glasgow citizens lack: an organisation they can call their own.

More than who wins Glasgow City Council or even whether the city should or should not have a Mayor, the city needs to address two fundamentals. First, what is Glasgow’s modern story? After industry and empire, we have tried shopping and consumption, and it hasn’t worked.

More fundamentally, whose story do we want to tell and who gets to tell it? The Glasgow elites and experts know best mindset is part of the problem, but how can Glaswegians speak and find a collective voice? And perhaps most of all, this is an issue for all Scotland, for a thriving, successful Scotland requires a thriving, dynamic Glasgow. For that to happen, ‘Glasgow Belongs to Me’ has to have a modern relevance.

Scotland and the UK according to the Free Marketeers

Gerry Hassan

Open Democracy, April 13th 2012

It is a sign of the times, and of its importance as an issue, that the global player which is ‘The Economist’ has Scottish independence as its cover and main feature this week, declaring, ‘It’ll cost you: The price of Scottish independence’.

Their cover, leader, main UK article and a secondary piece, tell something about ‘The Economist’s’ view of Scottish independence, the UK and the world, each of which I will examine.

‘The Economist’ takes a dim view of Scottish independence; it flies in the face of its view of the UK and the world; in breaking up this union which has given so much to mankind and to free market values.

Its editorial declares Scots could decide on independence ‘in the knowledge their country could end up as one of Europe’s vulnerable, marginal economies’ and just to underline this picture, sums up an independent Scotland as ‘a small, vulnerable barque’ (1). So that’s a ‘no’ from ‘The Economist’ to the whole idea!

They do concede that Scotland is no ‘subsidy junkie’ and could be viable as an independent nation, even going on to acknowledge:

In fact it performs better than all regions outside the south-east of England, and has done particularly well in the past decade. (2)

Yet they identify four what they regard as near-insurmountable problems with Scottish independence: the dominance and vagaries of oil, which would make up they calculate 18% of an independent Scotland’s GDP, doubts over the prospects of renewable energy, financial services, and the issue of the currency of an independent Scotland.

Some of the above points are based on very shaky foundations. Here is ‘The Economist’ on the EU and currency issues:

Though Mr. Salmond claims Scotland would enjoy automatic EU membership, European Commission lawyers are doubtful. A candidate Scotland would have to negotiate entry terms—and commit to join the euro one day. (3)

This is plain mischievous; and is based on the contentious Constitution Unit research of a decade ago which argued that an independent Scotland allowed the UK to continue sailing on serenely into the future (4). This is a very dubious reading of the UK and constitutional law. Scotland and England created the union that was the UK thus Scottish independence leaves not one new state, but two new states: Scotland and the rest of the UK. They either both get automatic entry into the EU or both have to reapply!

Then ‘The Economist’ claims that Scotland gets more public spending per head than the rest of the UK, which is inarguable, but goes on to claim that this is ‘in part a tacit acknowledgement that it contributes handsomely to oil revenues’ (5). This is plain 100% wrong; Goschen, the institutionalisation of territorial public spending dates back to 1888 and from exactly a century before Barnett.

There is the perilous state of Scotland’s financial sector which would become even more vulnerable post-independence. ‘Edinburgh’s fortunes as a banking centre would be hard to revive’, post-independence asserts ‘The Economist’ (6). Yet, at the same time, Edinburgh as a city is booming and recovered well from the shock of the banking crash. This week’s ‘Spectator’ has calculated that Edinburgh is the most prosperous part of the UK outside of London with a Gross Value Added wealth per head of £34,950 (7).

And then there are renewables which ‘The Economist’ questions. Scotland is the largest offshore renewable energy market in the EU: with 25% of offshore wind, 25% of tidal and 10% of wave power. As ‘The Scotsman’ put it recently, ‘Scotland leads the way not only within the UK but also globally’ (8).

The United Kingdom as ‘The Global Kingdom’

What is the unstated motivation in this is ‘The Economist’ vision of the UK (and beyond that globally). Their idea of the UK is as a shining free market Camelot on the hill, a ‘global kingdom’ of deregulation, marketisation, outsourcing, hucksterisation and bloviating: believing this toxic cocktail is the new zeitgeist of the 21^st century.

‘The Economist’ version of the UK is based on an outsourced, privately run NHS, a privately financed education system, universities in the hands of global winners and elites, privatised law enforcement, the Royal Mail sold off, the world’s oligarchs using London as their playground and the leading tax havens of the global economy centred around the Crown Dependencies, which while linked to the UK are constitutionally not part of it. This is a dystopia of Orwellian proportions, of the illusion of the autonomous, self-governing, sovereign individual, and in reality, of anxiety, doubt, constant unpredictability and not surprisingly, a renaissance in organised crime and the shadow economy.

This is an economy and culture where the importance of the English football Premiership league tells us a lot. A majority of its clubs are foreign owned and have offshore financial arrangements, while a majority of all European football club debt is within the twenty clubs of the Premiership. It is not just a metaphor but a direct example of the grotesque distortions of ‘Fantasy Island Britain’.

The UK is the fourth most unequal country in the developed world and according to Danny Dorling, on existing trends, will shortly surpass Singapore, Portugal and the US, to become the most unequal country in the rich world (9). Something for ‘The Economist’ to boast about perhaps on a future front cover?

London is the most unequal city in the rich world with a chasm of difference between the top 10% income wise and lowest 10% income wise of 273 to 1 (the difference in England overall being 96 to 1. As Neil O’Brien, head of the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange has written in this week’s ‘Spectator’, ‘London is like a Potemkin village for visitors; its population does not represent the UK at all’ (10).

‘The Economist’ as the Dave Spart of the Counter-Revolution

Finally, there is ‘The Economist’s’ take on the future of the world: what can only be described as a utopian globalisation dressed up in the rhetoric and values of a liberation theology of the market. It is actually deep down a linear optimism, a belief that the best tomorrow humanity can hope for is a bigger version of today and thus one profoundly pessimistic and depowering.

The journal’s vision for the future is handily laid out for all to see in its just published, ‘Megachange: The World in 2050’. In a chapter, ‘The great levelling’ it predicts a future where ‘the gap between the world’s rich and poor will be far narrower’ (11). Strangely though, for a book with a multitude of graphs confidently predicting the linear optimism of the future, not one fact is provided which supports this contention.

This tells us that ‘The Economist’ world for all its pretentions of evidence-based policy is actually founded on blind faith, dogma and a narrow, inflexible economic determinism. It is the Dave Spart of the counter-revolution: over-earnest, humourless and constantly predictable in its one dimensional, very masculine take on the world.

Scottish independence won’t change the world. It will as ‘The Economist’ admits in one its quieter moments be something which can work if Scots want it to.

Scotland is the third richest nation or ‘region’ of the UK, with only London and the South East richer. If you take into account a proportionate share of oil and gas, Scotland is the richest part of the UK apart from London. Even ‘The Economist’ acknowledges the first part of this, but it doesn’t take the next step and concede the huge economic disparities which make up the UK. The entire UK economy is disfigured by the uneven development around London and the South East, with the capital virtually becoming as ‘The Spectator’ addresses, not just a ‘world city’, but its own empire city, the centre of the empire state building that is the UK.

As the economist John Kay argued last year, Scotland gains and loses by becoming independent and gains and loses by remaining in the union; there are risks associated with both, but for many of us in Scotland, the risks of the union grow higher by the day. Kay wrote that ‘the gain in sovereignty would be limited by the realities of globalisation’ (12), a language of nuance miles removed from some of the Armageddon nightmares presented by some pro-union opinion.

The union that is Scotland and England in the UK has been as ‘The Economist’ notes ‘a marriage’. It gave much to both countries through the ages; Scotland contributed disproportionately to the civil servants, buccaneers and soldiers of Empire. It now seems that this marriage has become one of convenience, after the love has gone, and that both parties while still rubbing along in many ways, barely know how to speak to the other one.

What Scotland is looking for is a renegotiation of the terms of the relationship; not necessarily a full or traditional divorce or separation, but a new relationship of equals in which both historic nations find their place in the world again.

A thoroughly modern relationship where we find mutual respect and affection for each other, remember common interests, traditions and shared history. That would be something fitting to the past we have shared on these isles, and a future shaped by hope and humility.

It would be a future very different from the rather arrogant, patronising, hectoring world of ‘The Economist’ – a world which increasingly works for only a tiny, unrepresentative elite and which is widely seen to have failed after three decades of revolution. ‘The Economist’ may be content to be the ‘Pravda’ of its age, but some of us want to aspire to a different kind of world.

Notes

1. ‘It’ll cost you: Scottish independence would come at a high price’, The Economist Leader, April 14^th 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21552564

2. ‘The economics of home rule: The Scottish play’, The Economist, April 14^th 2012, http://www.economist.com/node/21552572

3. It’ll cost you’, The Economist Leader.

4. Jo Eric Murkens with Peter Jones and Michael Keating, Scottish Independence: A Practical Guide, Edinburgh University Press 2002.

5. ‘The economics of home rule’, The Economist.

6. Ibid.

7. Jonathan Jones, ‘Planet London’, Spectator Coffee House, April 12^th 2012, http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/7781588/planet-london.thtml

8. The Scotsman, March 19^th 2012.

9. Danny Dorling, Fair Play: A Daniel Dorling Reader on Social Justice, Policy Press 2011.

10. Neil O’Brien, ‘Another Country’, The Spectator, April 14^th 2012.

11. Zanny Minton Beddoes, ‘The Great Levelling’, in Daniel Franklin and John Andrews (eds.), Megachange: The World in 2050, Profile Books 2012, p. 181.

12. Gerry Hassan, ‘Anatomy of a Scottish Revolution: The Potential of a Post-nationalist Scotland and the Future of the United Kingdom’, Political Quarterly, Vol. 82 No. 3, p. 376.