Andrew Tickell: A Roughly Familiar Beast?

ISSUE 52

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THE DROUTH

SUMMER 2015

ISSUE 52

THE DROUTH

SUMMER 2015

Andrew Tickell

A Roughly Familiar Beast?

Much of what once was solid in Scottish public life has melted into air. Our politics, which for so long seemed dominated by steady and dependable assumptions, has become strangely contemporary.

The old maps and charts give out. Poles have reversed, polls have reversed, and the compass doesn’t understand its points.

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For three generations of my family, save for the In this journal before the referendum, I wrote odd spark of life and unpredicted, unlasting about my great-grandfather, Dr Angus Miller. victory, the political territory of this country A cantankerous old sod, contrary, with a tragic remained dismally predictable. Until 2007, life, Angus was born during the reign of Queen almost fifty years into his life, my father had never Victoria and became the first member of my voted for a successful candidate in any election. family to join and fund what was to become Liberal bastions were defended. The Scottish the Scottish National Party. He went to his Conservatives enjoyed a long decay – clobbed unmarked grave with his ambitions for an in 1997 and yet to recover its senses or to make independent Scotland unfulfilled. His daughter, any significant recovery. Bricks occasionally my grandmother, did likewise, the party symbol fell from the Scottish Labour monolith, but the coiled on the order of service presented at her funeral. My father was a young council candidate cracks were plastered over, and replacements found. The tower of force, the domination, held. for the party in Stirling in the grim days of the The fundamentals shifted gradually, quietly Thatcherite 1980s, fighting a fruitless battle – but nowhere, apparently, to the SNP’s explicit against the forces of Darth Michael Forsyth and advantage.With the election of the SNP minority the recently defenestrated Scottish Labour MP, government in 2007, its supporters’ terminal Michael Connarty. The atmosphere was ugly. outsider status was finally reversed, but the The Nationalists were nowhere.

Westminster map continued to reflect the old They kept the flame alive – a tiny, twinkling logic. Fortress Glasgow. Fortress Lanarkshire. flame – but no more than that. The retreat was Unconquerable. Unbreakable. Sustained general. Scottish independence remained a campaigning in Govan had secured Nicola crackpot idea with little mainstream purchase, Sturgeon a tiny, precarious foothold south of the never mind appeal. Devolution wasn’t even on the river in 2007, but she cut a lonely figure. Not quite horizon. Labour’s “feeble fifty” chuntered away another Margo, but the one who had slipped quietly in the Commons, embracing a nationalist through the net thanks in part to an idle and rhetoric which would ultimately prove to be absentee Labour opponent (Gordon “Crackerjack” their undoing. The idea of a referendum on an Jackson QC) rather than a spearhead presaging independent Scotland, or of the SNP seizing an Nationalist victories to come. unprecedented fifty-six Commons seats, would have been met with a black laugh. The encircling gloom was unpierceable: Tory government unmoderated by Labour domination. The worst of both worlds.

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The 2010 UK general election returned almost identical results to 2005. The SNP were squeezed into their accustomed irrelevance. Their clunky, ungrammatical slogan – “more Nats less cuts” – and appeal for “local champions”, fell on deaf ears. The six MPs they returned represented a respectable enough showing, but suggested that the old order had not collapsed with Alex Salmond’s installation in Bute House three years before. The stubborn, gnarled old warhorse of Scottish Labour was not so easily routed.

With Gordon Brown in Downing Street, Scots remained true Britons still: the critical (and, in the event, forlorn) thing was to keep the Tories out. The electorate did their ancestral duty, and recoated the electoral map red. All the old epithets still applied. Heartlands of deepest hue. Votes weighed not counted. Your choice of bubbleheaded animal with a red rosette elected.

As the 2011 Holyrood election approached, and the SNP sought to renew its fragile mandate, familiar fatalisms worried fretfully in my gut.

2007 was a fluke. A happy, lucky accident which wouldn’t be repeated. Alex Salmond led a minority government which had ratchetted up some achievements and gains, but one which could easily, all too easily, be displaced, even accidentally, by the country’s old tribalisms and loyalties. It still felt like politics on a knifeedge, with the weight of history and expectation behind your old foes. Even after an appalling and illiberal Scottish Labour campaign, under a cardboard leader, promising a massive, unfunded expansion of the prison estate, my sense of dread that wet election morning was overwhelming.

Iain Gray had managed to squander a significant Labour lead in the polls. The social research suggested the Nationalists were on course to do well – but almost nobody prophesied the election of a majority government under a proportional system. We’d unconsciously set aside the idea the polls were true. The long shadow cast by that Clydeside citadel again: “west central Scotland will buck these predictions. Voting Labour is what this country does.” That’s one of the joys of elections: their quotidian nervousness. Fretting over the scratch of a million pencils.

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In the event, these apprehensions proved mistaken, but they remain instructive. Labour’s hubris found its mirror in my anxieties. However much I might have railed against them, and denounced their arrogance and conceit, I now realise I shared many of the assumptions which undergirded the party’s increasingly pathological and complacent sense of entitlement. Nothing changes. The tired waves, vainly breaking, gain no painful inch. Nor were such pessimistic assumptions uniquely mine. As recently as last May, I received a message shortly before the polls closed from one of the soon-to-be triumphant SNP candidates standing in what would once have been thought a dyed-in-the-wool Labour district.

She routed the incumbent and went on to secure a majority of more than 10,000. “I think I’m going to lose,” she said at 9.45pm, without a trace of false modesty. Those old myths bite. But now they have been consigned to oblivion.

Scottish Labour has been rightly criticised for being stubbornly in thrall to its own history and stories, self-delighted, blinded by a blind faith in its own imminent return to power. Their attitudes have recalled Talleyrand’s diagnosis of the exiled and decapitated Bourbon monarchy, displaced by the 1789 revolution in France: “Scottish Labour has learned nothing and forgiven nothing.” The ancien regime will be restored. The people will realise their duty, and after appropriate penance for their errors, will return our candidates once again. All we need is patience, and the people will soon discover what a ghastly mistake they have made. On being elected in the Dunfermline by-election of November 2013, the victorious Labour candidate expressed this point of view with startling explicitness. Cara Hilton, a party dynast whose mother had served as an MSP until 2011, suggested that the by-election represented an important waystation on Labour’s journey of “reconnecting” with Scottish communities and “rebuilding trust” in the party. A hard road, she recognised, but one to be trod, with the now betrayed and deposed Johann Lamont leading the way: the chosen people’s unlikely Moses in the electoral desert.

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The Holyrood election of 2011 may have been So much, so boiler-plated. But she went further, a grisly affair, but even this could be spun as trusting that soon, “many more Scots will see an isolated crisis of leadership, and blamed on Labour as the party that we have always been.

The party that is on their side. Representing their a lacklustre campaign. When the right man [sic] was found to replace the charismaless best interests, aspirations and dreams for the future.” The problem faced by Labour, on Hilton’s Gray and his overwhelmed successor – the miscast Johann Lamont – everything would diagnosis, was not their own missteps, or errors, fall back into its proper place. Jim Murphy – or mediocrity, but the people’s loss of trust in the the most comically overrated and comically party that was always really on their side. The people had misapprehended where their interests unsuccessful leader his party has known – was the evanescent beneficiary of these delusions. lay. If Labour was to win again, it was for the people to falter, change and repent, not the party. “Jim will fix Scotland,” former Blair apparatchik and “strategist” John McTernan suggested, This was the – remarkable, ridiculous – lesson before helping the East Renfrewshire MP to drive the new blood had taken from their doldrum his party into the arid ground which the indyref years in opposition. had tilled. Curiously, McTernan’s reputation for Wounded by successive defeats, the people’s tactical sharpness seems to have survived this party has increasingly resembled the credulous misadventure, as it survived his tenure as chief victim of repeat pyramid selling. The sap taken spinner to the defeated Australian Labor Prime in by every scam, who never loses the conviction Minister, Julia Gillard, and his responsibility that this get-rich-quick scheme will pony up for Labour’s divided and dysfunctional 2007 the goods. The defeat in Holyrood in 2007 was a campaign. McTernan continues to enjoy a lucky break for gambler Salmond, but signified ghoulish second life as one of Tony Blair’s no fundamental break, no essential change, in horcruxes, popping up on national telly to share the political allegiances of the Scottish people. his disloyal tactical nous by denouncing his The loss of Glasgow East in 2008 was a passing Corbyn-supporting comrades in the party as calamity, but the resounding win in Glenrothes “morons” and “suicidally inclined”. UK Labour may in 2008 proved that the old order would be be reluctant to take lessons from a gentleman restored next time around. 2010 rebuked 2007 whose own career is littered with catastrophes, and promised eviction notices for Salmond and and whose ideological commitments seem to Sturgeon in 2011. Retaining its overall control extend only to maintaining a “lean and of Glasgow City Council under a proportional hungry” look. system in 2012 proved that the party’s ancient If their public remarks are anything to go by, ramparts could and would outlast these Nationalist sorties – it was all just a temporary bit McTernan and his master bought fully into yet another misinterpretation of the political of local bother. Labour’s victory in Cowdenbeath scene. Once victory had been achieved in the at the beginning of 2014 proved the Nationalist independence referendum, and the Scottish juggernaut had ground to a dead halt, and 2015 people had declared that we are “better together”, would be a cinch. they reasoned the SNP would collapse into an ugly and divisive internecine conflict, a gruesome political vivisection replete with unfraternal gougings. While the Nationalists rent and tore at each other, anatomising the failed campaign, laying blame – the People’s Party, sober, statesmanlike, garlanded in victory, speaking up for the silent majority – would return to lay claim to its ancestral rights and responsibilities. Patience, comrades, patience.

All we need do is wait.

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Events have shown that this diagnosis was almost comically self-serving and naive. But considered from certain angles, the Scottish people’s two-step dance with the Labour party has been remarkably cruel. Now blowing hot, now cold, since 2007 Scots have given Scottish Labour a tempest of mixed political messages.

It is critical to remember: this has been a long slide towards the abyss. The tactical decision to participate in the Better Together campaign is important – but it can’t be the whole story of the implosion of “Labour Scotland.” Events have done more than substitute the colours flying over St Andrews House. The very foundations of the party’s organisation have gradually been undermined since the Scottish Parliament “reconvened” in 1999.

Devolution transformed the SNP from a political party, representing only in pockets of the country, into a truly national party. It transmuted them into an opposition, multiplying the party’s elected representatives, but also their staff, and their organisational capacity. The introduction of proportional representation had cleared out Labour’s rotten boroughs, and with it, at least part of the activist base which felt obliged to turn out. Across the country, Jack McConnell lost 161 councillors while the SNP gained 182. In Glasgow before 2007, the opposition consisted of a single Tory, and three councillors apiece for the Liberal Democrats and the SNP. Under first past the post, Labour held seventy-one of seventy-nine council wards (90%) in the city on less than 47.7% of the vote. Though the Labour administration’s majority withstood the introducing of the single transferrable vote, the overwhelming hegemony it had once enjoyed evaporated.

The Holyrood elections of 2007 and 2011 instituted another cull of MSPs and their staff and the locus for local organisation and activity they represented. We haven’t begin to contemplate just how hollow the once dominant Labour machine has now become after 2015. A whole generation of ambitious, thrusting young activists are now claiming the universal credit instead of power. The fact has gone largely unnoticed, but Labour will shortly have been out of power in Scotland for longer than Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell ever exercised it. If, as all the polls predict, the party can now only anticipate going down d 42

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The fact has gone largely unnoticed, but Labour will shortly have been out of power in Scotland for longer than Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish and Jack McConnell ever exercised it. If, as all the polls predict, the party can now only anticipate going down disaster against Nicola Sturgeon in 2016 – and unforeseen calamities and scandals don’t cut her administration short – Scottish Labour will have been out of power for fourteen years.

“Things can only get better” – never truer, never bleaker.

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isaster against Nicola Sturgeon in 2016 – and unforeseen calamities and scandals don’t cut her administration short – Scottish Labour will have been out of power for fourteen years. “Things can only get better” – never truer, never bleaker.

But tough questions remain. What political space can Scottish Labour now occupy? There is no need for two parties of the social democratic centre left. There is no space for two parties of the centre left. Wargame the options. Does Labour try to outflank the SNP on the left? It is a notion: but both of the party’s potential leaders – Kezia Dugdale and Ken Macintosh – are left-centrists nationally and on the right of their party. They may not have Jim Murphy’s rampant implausibility as a happy democratic socialist warrior – but their hearts don’t seem to lie in a

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leftward journey. Or do they move rightwards, to occupy the centre-right territory Ruth Davidson cannot command? Or do we favour option three: is it the fate of the SNP and Scottish Labour Party to become the leftward-facing Fine Gael and Fianna Fails, divided over constitutional history, but squabbling over the arid, consensuallydefined centre ground of politics? A game of personalities, and how you voted on the 18th of September 2014? Time will tell. But there is no rule of nature which requires Scottish Labour to remain – even as the second party. Parties and political movements die when their material basis disappears. If the bloodless leadership election is anything to go by, none of the party’s candidates have even begun to reckon with their Scottish holocaust. Beyond the easy slogans and

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the obvious gloating, senior Nationalists’ lips are similarly ineloquent – at least in public – about which way now to turn.

I’ve come to think of the 2015 election as the cause of two bereavements. First, and more obviously, the Scottish Labour party must now have been shaken free of its Bourbon delusions.

It was a curious sight on the morning after the election, tough old war dogs like John Reid, reduced to rheumy-eyed croaks by the immolation of their Scottish parliamentary delegation. Labour lost not only seats – but an identity which the party had clung to with increasing desperation during the campaign.

They say the past is another country. For old hands like Reid, and the rest of the New Labour Jurassic park of Labour figures, all that was solid had become air in their very hands. None of them quite said it, but in the bilious and red-faced post-mortems demanded by the 24 hour news agenda, several seemed to stammer “I’ve lost my country, I don’t know where I am anymore.” The disorientation was general.

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contemporary Scottish politics, liberated from its old allegiances and antipathies?

Elsewhere, I have argued that the SNP also needs to stop obsessing about their opponents. Going on and on about the ancien regime after the guilty heads have taken their tumbril ride to the Place de la Révolution may have its psychological compensations, but it is a blind political alley.

Too many Nationalists behave like slighted partners, who have caught their partner in an affair. Having taken their unfaithful spouse to task, they continue to bring up the dalliance constantly, obsessively. Bereft of the old atlases, you can understand the temptation to navigate by familiar landmarks. The potent old identities and stories. But this impulse is just an evasion, an excuse to avoid the new reality, and the disturbing open terrain it has created.

I had a German friend, a man of the world and a philosopher, who was pushed to the edge of reason by the Australian outback. Used to the linear, paved, ordered, significance-bearing streets of urban Deutschland, he found himself naked beneath the burning antipodean sky.

But in gloating over this bereavement, it He baulked, overwhelmed by the heat, the is easy to overlook a second, rooted in the emptiness, the monumentless, trackless steps experiences of my family, which helps explain he could take in every direction. Panic gripped the anxieties which tumbled around in my belly him, this solid, slightly stolid Tuton. Our maps in both 2007 and 2011. The SNP is no longer and compasses can become an oppression, but a party for losers, for outsiders, crackpots and part of us still loves them. Their stability, their contrarians. It is no longer a party condemned mute governance, their taken-for-grantedness. to perpetual opposition. The lifelong holder of Rebelling within their territories is one thing minority opinions now finds himself in common – to overthrow them quite another.

It takes an company with a great part of the nation. The audacious spirit, a bold and awful spirit, to party’s core ambition – independence – has navigate beyond the whaleroads, and to tread not yet secured majority support, but has been the briared wilderness, directionlessly. Scottish thrust into the mainstream of UK and Scottish politics now walks this strange, pathless path, politics for the first time in this nation’s history unencumbered by many of our old inheritances since the Union of 1707. Politically, this may be and old certainties.

Like Nietzsche at the the source of understandable glee for Scottish mountain top, aghast at the experience of a Nationalists. But psychologically, we should new kind of freedom, but fearing to fall. In some remember the secret tie between wound and moods, the Scottish electorate can seem like weapon. Remember that the hater is somehow Yeats’ beast in the desert.

“Its gaze blank and invested in the object he hates, the opposition pitiless as the sun”, it has “moved its slow thighs”, in its opponent. Scottish Labour’s humbling is at kicking up the birds and sand of triumph and once gratifying and disturbing because it knocks disaster.

The centre has not held.

And we are left through one of the structuring pillars of Scottish with the most contemporary political question political life. You derive a sense of freedom from of all: what rough beast, its hour come around the act of destruction, but also one of anxiety. at last, slouches to London – to Edinburgh – to What now? What are the governing principles be born? of this new time? What are this generation’s touchstones, politically? What will become of this 44

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– but it is easy to get carried away. As the surface characters seem to change, you begin to spot the continuities, the smuggled freight, and the backward glances. For one of the most striking illustrations of this – step forward Mhairi Black, the baby of the House of Commons, and the youngest MP to be elected to parliament since sixteen-oatcake. In her maiden speech in the Commons, which at time of writing has been watched by more than ten million people, Black laid into the Conservative government’s welfare reform agenda. She drew on her experience of the brutality of social security sanctions, which beggar, freeze and starve far too many of our fellow citizens. Her ferocious intolerance for manifest injustice and for bureaucratic inhumanity was palpable. But Black also thought it important to share a few thoughts with the Labour Party members to her right. And the great white hope for a new generation of engaged, working class politicians was – curiously backwards looking. In the critical section, she said: “I have in this chamber for ten weeks, and I have very deliberately stayed quiet and have listened intently to everything that has been said. I have heard multiple speeches from Labour benches standing to talk about the worrying rise of nationalism in Scotland, when in actual fact all these speeches have served to do is to demonstrate how deep the lack of understanding about Scotland is within the Labour party.

I, like many SNP members, come from a traditional socialist Labour family and I have never been quiet in my assertion that I feel that it is the Labour party that left me, not the other way about. The SNP did not triumph on a wave of nationalism; in fact nationalism has nothing to do with what’s happened in Scotland. We triumphed on a wave of hope, hope that there was something different, something better to the Thatcherite neo-liberal policies that are produced from this chamber. Hope that representatives genuinely could give a voice to those who don’t have one.

After hearing the Labour leader’s intentions to support the changes of tax credits that the Chancellor has put forward, I must make this plea to the words of one of your own and a

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personal hero of mine. Tony Benn once said that in politics there are weathercocks and sign posts. Weathercocks will spin in whatever direction the wind of public opinion may blow them, no matter what principal they may have to compromise. And then there are signposts, signposts which stand true, and tall, and principled. And they point in the direction and they say this is the way to a better society and it is my job to convince you why. Tony Benn was right when he said the only people worth remembering in politics were signposts.”

The force of her speech derived from its directness, from its authenticity, from its juxtaposition with and rebuke to the unreal Tomkinson’s School Days atmosphere of the chamber. I take nothing away from that. But if we are prepared to treat the contents of her oratory seriously – from the youngest politician in Scotland, given the opportunity to say anything to the House of Commons uninterrupted, this is a remarkably backwardslooking sentiment and a rusty set of signposts to travel by. A grizzled old defector like the affable Tommy Sheppard or the late Jimmy Reid might have echoed these sentiments, word for word.

But unlike Black, they would have the lines on their faces and the scars on their backs to explain them.

Paisley’s new MP was born on the 12th of September 1994. On the 21st of July earlier that year, after the premature death of John Smith, one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair defeated John Prescott and Margaret Beckett to ascend to the UK Labour leadership. So which Labour party was it which left Mhairi Black? Was it Jim Callaghan’s compromises in office between 1976 and 1979 which put her off? The expulsion of Militant in the 1980s? The Healey-Benn deputy leadership conflict of 1981? Or perhaps it was the Kinnock-era triangulation which offended? Or was it Blair’s sheer effectiveness and enthusiasm for the trick which proved intolerable? Or replacing red flags with roses? Or was all well – or at least bearable – until the Iraq war of 2003?

And which Anthony Wedgwood Benn are we admiring, and why? The pious, upper-class, technocratic minister of technology? The man who “read Marx for the first time in his fifties and thought he was absolutely marvellous” in 45

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Whether or not you find the indictment convincing – and there is clearly evidence to be adduced both by the prosecution and the defence here – it is an important (and perhaps concerning) reminder that it isn’t so easy to rouse yourself from your history. Like me, she still feels the force her own family inheritance.

Unpredictably, perhaps, the two stands of identity and tradition have now become intertwined. We haven’t begun to reason through the implications There is a banal point of history to be made here. of that alignment. But we are creatures of The past is plastic. From its detritus, we all shape continuity and discontinuity. We knit as we fray. meaning selectively and forgetfully. A maiden The fresh features of the rough beast – slouching speech isn’t a critical tract, but a piece of rhetoric. through Inverness and Aberdeen and Dundee Its purpose isn’t analytically to anatomise and Glasgow, through Lanarkshire and the Black a career or a tradition, but an opportunity to Isle and Edinburgh and the Borders – will always make a splash, to inspire, to talk to and for your seem somehow familiar. constituents. It is epideictic rhetoric. On that basis, Black succeeded admirably. I don’t doubt that many of her constituents will remember Benn vaguely but fondly. Many more will have nodded along vigorously at the idea that they have been abandoned by Labour, crying “gaun yersel’” into their iPhones and computers. The sentiment she expressed undeniably resonates.

Black’s presence in the chamber, and her defeat of Douglas Alexander, speak to the truth of that.

Healy’s biting phrase? Or the cuddly, eloquent “national treasure” Benn who, safely out of power, led the Stop the War coalition? There are many respectable and intellectually defensible answers here, depending on your political ideas and priorities, but it is far from clear which history of the Labour Party, or which version of her personal hero, the academically-gifted Black hopes to appeal.

But the slipperiness of the reality which lies behind the compelling storytelling, the idea that the SNP is really a continuity Labour movement – tells us something important about the Brave New Scotland 50% of the electorate created on the 7th of May 2015. The past and its identities continue to cast its long shadow. Even Scotland’s newest SNP MP, in the salad days of youth, thinks historically, looking backwards, appealing backwards, to a placeless, timeless authenticity which Scottish Labour is alleged have betrayed.

In some ways, it was a ceremony of political innocence. But delivered with conviction.

With passionate intensity.

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