Has a D Notice been served advising newspaper publishers to suppress facts for the sake of public order? Have Scotland’s commentators been hypnotised? Are organised gangs intimidating newsagents to prevent them from selling any publication which might reveal the truth? Surely there must be some explanation? It is now almost a month since the Scottish election and enough newsprint has been dedicated to its analysis to wrap a decade’s worth of fish suppers. And still no-one has thought it important enough to point out that the Scottish electorate has taken a seemingly conscious and informed decision to shift Scottish politics significantly to the left.
It seems that the only lazy minds left in Scotland are those which are paid to enlighten us. We have a Parliament which is filled with ideas, opinions and agendas which – whether you agree with them all or not – are undoubtedly a breath of fresh air and are set to invigorate the political debate. We have a public which, where it did bother to vote, chose to disregard established patterns and imagine a different kind of political future for Scotland. If the conversations which have cropped up in civic Scotland are anything to go by we now seem to have a Scottish society which has been alerted to the possibilities of a new direction for public life. For the first time in quite a long time we have a country which is scratching its head and trying to work out both the implications of what has happened and the possibilities it opens up. For the first time since 1997 we have a thinking Scotland. But you could only know that by living here and you would need to talk to people. If you were to get your info from the press you would assume that the set patterns of British politics had been given a bit of a row and told to get on with it. That is simply not what has happened. Frankly, given Scotland’s economic performance over the last three decades you would think we would be able to tell the difference between a wake-up call and a P45. Scotland’s one-opinion state did not get a wake-up call on the first of May.
As well as the straight numbers game there are many aspects of the election outcome which are enormously important. So far the interpretation of these has been characterised by lazy knee-jerk, confused myopia and wilful disregard and distortion. Before this third-rate punditry becomes the received ‘wisdom’, some important points need to be made and some important questions asked.
Turnout
The first issue on which everyone can agree is that the turnout at the election was disappointing. Everyone can also agree that it is primarily the responsibility of the political parties to address this problem and re-engage people. The point at which agreement breaks down and ideas fail to emerge is the dual questions: why is it happening and how do we reverse it? Why? We are told that people are disillusioned with politics, that negative campaigning puts people off, that the political process is too far away from them, that traditional political engagement no longer fits in with people’s lifestyles, that it is an unavoidable international trend. To fix things we are told that we need to have more of the same politics but with better logos, that people should be allowed to vote by mobile phone, that we should hold our parliamentary sessions in the cheapest looking building possible. Frankly, the people saying these things don’t even look convinced by them.
The truth that has to be faced up to is that low political turnouts are not a side-effect of the current international political project – they are one of its aims. Throughout the world the free-market based political aristocracy has done everything they could to turn politics into a system of micro management. The leaders of free-market-government have not failed to engage people in politics, they have succeeded in disengaging people from politics. Any sane person looking at the last six months in international politics could not draw any comforting conclusions. The crude manner in which America has just seized control of the world’s second biggest oil field (is anyone still pretending it was about human rights or international security?), the way in which Israel has finally given up on any pretence of a semblance of law in it’s mass execution programme (please sign here so we can kill you with impunity), Blair’s blatant plans to prepare schools, hospitals and universities for eventual take-over by American corporations (section 15 of the foundation hospitals legislation allows for the sub-contraction of all aspects of running a hospital to the private sector), the 1930s Germany climate we have now adopted to asylum seekers (we’re flying handcuffed people back to a country we bombed almost into extinction and where no more than a few percent of the land area is controlled by anyone other than vicious warlords). One of the key conditions for allowing rabid foaming at the mouth free-marketeers to take control of the entire world is that the rest of us avert our eyes (or never hear about it in the first place). And this applies particularly to the poor and dispossessed.
Blair does not attempt to engage in discussions with the electorate. The reason he has given for falling in behind him on foundation hospitals/dismantling the NHS is that if we don’t it will be “the biggest mistake for a generation”. OK, that’s fine then – the political social and economic concerns some of us had are assuaged now. It is with wonder that we await to find out how he is going to persuade us to back him on his next looting mission into British public life.
“If this Parliament blocks this move to hand the running of the home civil service over to Microsoft it will be an affront to God.” We have been explicitly told that government is now about doing less in the notional belief that this will therefore mean it is being done better. We are not supposed to question politics, the media/corporate/government agenda does not encourage us to think about politics, we are not educated to understand politics, we are supposed to vote primarily on personality, scare story and vague vision. We are supposed to vote for them once every four years but we are not supposed to hold them to account for any specific thing they did, only for their general ‘niceness’.
So what is the lesson from this election? Regardless of the Daily Mail’s attempts to kid on that the turnout was under 50 per cent it wasn’t (50.4 on the second vote, so they turned out even if they didn’t vote on every ballot). But it isn’t a problem with Scottish politics (although the relentless domestic media attacks haven’t helped), it is a problem with world politics. Transforming the education system in Scotland to train future generations to understand the things governments decide on would be the biggest single step we could take. If people understood that there is more to running the world than micro-managing the finer points of penal policy they will realise the importance of voting. And the political parties also have to accept the difference between apathy and antipathy. Did people fail to vote because they don’t care or because they don’t feel that they can alter the things they care about? We need to look for evidence to answer these crucial questions. The answer seems to be that the only winners from this election were those who offered an alternative to the narrow free-market consensus. Don’t blame Scotland, but that does not get Scottish politics off the hook.
Drift left
So what do we learn from those that did turn up? That’s an easy one to answer because everyone agrees – it was a protest vote against four years of underperformance by the Parliament. Nonsense. It is time to kick this lazy thinking into touch. There was one party which stood at the election which pitched all its activity to gather the protest vote of those disillusioned with devolution so far. It openly scorned the Parliament in campaigning and offered populist right-wing initiatives which by the standards of current politics did not look extremist. The Scottish People’s Alliance had a high profile campaign with two sitting MSPs defecting to their cause, activists put up a large number of posters and stuck a lot of leaflets through doors and their presentation was professional. And yet they polled like the Monster Raving Looney Party. If the election had been a protest – particularly if it had been a protest based on disillusionment with devolution – the SPA would have been a recipient of a part of that protest. It wasn’t. Why this should be is a question which a lot of people don’t seem to want to think about.
Here’s another one. In 1999 these same sages nodded wisely and told us that the SNP had underperformed in the election because of its commitment to raise income tax by one pence. The SNP had failed to learn the big lesson of the last 15 years (we were told) and the lesson was that people will not vote for higher taxes because Thatcher had changed politics for ever. Redistribution was off the agenda. So if the ‘logic’ of these commentators is to be followed, the SNP crash at this election must be assessed in relation to the rightward drift of their policies. After all, if you can blame the ‘99 result on the tax agenda surely you have to judge the much worse ‘03 result on the same basis. If we are supposed to believe that ‘99 proved that Scotland had rejected the tax and spend agenda, surely ‘03 proved beyond any argument that Scotland has emphatically rejected the ever-freermarket agenda. Low taxes for business are now over. Of course, that isn’t the conclusion which the pro-market commentators have drawn. That is because they don’t draw conclusions, they have rigid political prejudices based on self interest and pounce on anything which they can twist to apparently prove their ideas. And it is the left which is supposed to be clinging to ‘ideology’ and dogma.
A few other quick facts. In 1999 the SNP – standing on a higher income tax agenda – polled its second best ever result. In 2003 people expected the SSP to take votes disproportionately from Labour but it looks like they actually took more votes from the SNP. Meanwhile the Labour Party polled its worst result since 1931 and is now actively supported by fewer than one in six Scots. The Scottish Tories did no more than hold their ground despite the traditionally disproportionate turnout rate of its voters in a low poll election – and did so by moving to the left of New Labour in England. There was no other progress on the right. The independents were not a random selection politically – all stood on an explicit left wing agenda (assuming that we can still call pro-public service and pro-welfare left wing).
So here’s what (probably) really happened.
By 1999 the Scottish Labour party had moved way to the right of many of its voters. Being the first election for the new Parliament and with the hope that Scottish Labour might take a different path from London Labour many of these people turned out for Labour anyway. Many others, however, turned to the SNP which had offered them what they wanted – a headline commitment to proper investment in public life funded through progressive taxation. This gave the SNP its second best ever result. However, by 2003 people realised that Labour in Scotland was not offering the radical politics it wanted and the SNP had drifted to an almost identical position – the centre right. The electorate rejected the free-market policies of both. This caused a sharp fall in Labour vote. However, things were much worse for the SNP because it lost not only disillusioned left SNP voters but also lost all of the disaffected left Labour voters who turned to them in ‘99. These voters decided that the low-tax, business before people, illiberal social stance and minimalist approach shared by the four main parties was well to the right of where they were. So they voted left, not in protest but because this is what they wanted and because they had learned from ‘99 that Scotland’s voting system meant that voters could actually get what they wanted.
This was not the protest election, this was the moment when the Scottish people forced the Scottish Parliament to swing back to the left, back toward the point at which it had earlier left them behind. This was the correction election, where the myth that the Scottish people were content to let politics drift further and further to the right was faced down.
Media and establishment
One of the biggest changes in this election was the first real challenge to the political establishment in Scotland for many generations. The Labour Party has been by far the dominant political force in Scotland since the 1960s, and it is the nature of the dominant political force to shape the rest of the nation in it image. The public appointments process is structurally designed to expand the political hegemony, and to refer to it as cronyism is actually to downplay its significance. There is nothing as blatant or visible as successive American administrations jostling to pack the Supreme Court with ‘our people’, but it is extensive nonetheless. And it is not just a formal process with places being handed out, it is also an informal process with people aligning themselves with the dominant political force either for cynical reasons or because their views have been shaped by that dominant culture in which they grew up. Most of you will have had some contact with a big organisation during the election campaign – be it public, private or voluntary sector. You may also be aware of the manner in which they were preparing their governmental relations strategy for after the election. If so you will be aware that they were almost all planning for a result which returned the status quo. Hell, there were no shortages of Chief Executives who were actually writing to Jack McConnell during the election trying to tie up deals about what he would do with his new administration. Organisations who communicated with the Greens and the SSP during the election campaign generally did so out of courtesy and not because they thought these parties could ever actually be important. The government of Scotland was viewed by far too many people in the way America views the government of Iraq – a process which follows a set pattern and which has little or nothing to do with the wishes of the electorate. Imagine how hard it is going to be for the British civil service to come to terms with this. In fact it will probably be the biggest shock to the British civil service since we lost the Indian colonies.
Meanwhile the media, whose principal players ought to have known better, behaved in almost exactly the same way. On the Saturday after the election the front pages of the newspapers were dominated by the ‘story’ that the Greens were going to form a ‘traffic light’ coalition with Labour and the Lib Dems. Which seemed odd, because anyone who knew Scottish politics ought to have known that the Greens had as a matter of policy ruled out any formal coalition. It also seemed odd that these professional political watchers would give any credence to the idea that the Greens – collectively or individually – would be even a little bit likely to supply the majority which would allow Jack to pass his ‘lock up the parents for their child’s crimes’ legislation. Have they ever met a Scottish Green? Do they understand the political position of the Green Party? Why would they believe such a story for a second? The surprising thing is that in almost none of these stories did the journalist involved actually manage (or bother) to get a comment, formal or informal, from the Green Party itself. Straight after the election which changed the narrow political consensus in Scotland journalists still thought they could report on Scottish politics by relying on ‘leaks’ from Labour. The Labour Party is now only one voice in a rainbow spectrum of political views and parties in Scotland. Journalists will quickly need to learn that their old one-page contact book will not get them through to the new Scotland.
The implications of the election do not stop at the doors of the Parliament. All of Scotland – including the chief executives and the hacks – had better get used to the idea that Scottish politics is no longer something which takes place in closed rooms. Dear Chief Executive, do you realise that all that legislation you wanted passed (be it the right to plant GM crops, the ability to impose pay settlements, reduced business rates) may now lie in the hands of the Scottish Socialist Party? Do you have their phone number yet?
The future
How different does this make our Parliament for the next four years? Well, lets look backwards to find out. Imagine the last four years had taken place under this Parliament. Just two examples; we would now have free school meals for all Scottish school children and a firm resolution opposing the war in Iraq would have been passed putting ever more pressure on Tony Blair. And those are only the different outcomes which would have emerged from a cautious and far from radical four years. It ought to alert people to what is possible over the next four years in which the Greens and the SSP have seats on the Business Bureau which decides the business of the Parliament and seats in every Parliamentary committee.
So we can expect a radical programme?
Well, no, because there is a very solid coalition at the heart of the Scottish Parliament. It was not the Lib Dems who got Labour through the last Parliament, it was the Tories. On the contentious issues which Labour really had to win (such as the war votes) it was not the Lib Dems who delivered the results for Labour it was the Tories. In fact, the only two votes the Executive lost were the ones where the Tories deserted them. On the initial flashpoint issues for the new administration it is already clear that Labour needs the Tories – they are the only party which will support the jailing of parents for their children’s crimes, for example. In fact, the Labour Party could probably just about get through the next four years by relying on the ad hoc votes of either the Lib Dems or the Tories on an issue by issue basis. The problem for Jack is that he simply cannot be seen to be closer to the Tories than to any other party in the Parliament. It is true, but it would be too much for his party. The coalition talks were as much about saving Jack from relying on the Tories as anything.
And what of the smaller parties? They can expect both taming and vilification. Within days of the election commentators were falling over themselves to argue that the Greens were much closer to the Labour Party than they were to the socialists. There has been a drip drip of stories claiming there have been bitter splits between the two parties. The media is desperately trying to de-radicalise the Greens. Once again, this can only lead to the conclusion that none of these commentators have actually met any of the Greens. Meanwhile the Record and the Scotsman have the SSP in their sights and will waste not a single opportunity to put the boot in. The wise men of Scotland (the gender assumption in this phrase is not accidental) are already saying that the small parties will be badly damaged if all they do is be ‘obstructionist’. Translate that. The small parties will be harmed if they do not agree with and behave like the big parties. Have these ‘wise men’ learned nothing from this election? Can’t they see that they put these people in the Parliament precisely because they didn’t slavishly agree with the big parties? Scare stories of the process of government grinding to a halt are laughable – the vast majority of the core legislation which is required to keep a country running is consensual. The SSP and the Green simply couldn’t drag the thing to a halt even if they wanted to (there are only 17 of them not from the main parties after all). What they will do it change the nature and tone of the debate. Words matter. Phrases such as ‘the redistribution of wealth’ do not bounce off the political debate, they change it. The Executive can no longer make itself feel safe just by doing what it needs to to stay on the right side of the CBI, it is going to have to do things to make sure that it keeps on the right side of the many SSP and Green voters (and the many other who are very sympathetic to what these parties have to say). The political pressure in Scotland is no longer from the right, it is very much from the left. Politics always moves towards areas of high pressure. The Parliament is heading left.
So…
Devolution is a process, and in Scotland it is only going in one direction. Some in the Labour Party are desperate to convince you (and themselves) that the message of this election is that Scotland has rejected independence. They claim this even though more MSPs in this Parliament stood on an independence platform than did in the last. But this is not analysis, it is just a story people like Wendy Alexander tell themselves before going to bed to keep away the bad dreams. In this bad dream Labour has lost its core vote in its lurch to the right. People wake up to the fact that Scotland is being governed for corporations first and people second. The markets-at-all-costs philosophy is rejected. Wendy’s training at the prestigious French business school INSEAD on the needs and whims of big business turn out not to make her the most important person in Scotland after all. Local authorities are elected proportionately to the political views of people and the feudalism of Labour local government goes. Scotland becomes a vibrant country in which political debate stems from the healthy opposition of ideas coming from a range of different parties. Labour remains a very important part of Scottish politics, but only a part. And, worst of all, Labour has to start moving back to the left if it wants to survive the 2007 election. This is much worse than the worst ghouls and goblins thrown up by cheese before bed.
In a previous Scottish Left Review we wrote that although there are 129 MSPs they only have about ten opinions between them. That is something which no-one can say any more. Irrespective of your political beliefs, surely that is something everyone can take pride in. Well done the Scottish electorate, good job.
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