Politics works like a cart drawn by a number of antagonistic, independent-minded horses. Two or three are usually hitched to our cart of state, each wanting to pull along a different line. The direction the cart goes might be wobbly, but it usually ends up as a rough middle way between the course that each would take if it were hitched up alone.
If you like to whip your metaphors beyond exhaustion, you can have all kinds of fun with this. A one-party state is a cart drawn by one horse, with the rival horses hiding behind hedges and covertly lobbing stones at the beast, trying to upset its progress. Russian politics will soon be a harness of half-a-dozen ponies trotting along neatly, taking orders from the retired carthorse striding alongside. France’s horses are happy to accept extra-large nose bags, in exchange for altering their line a little; perhaps so as not to annoy some small animal en route. Italian politics involves horse’s heads, but only in the non-metaphorical sense.
Here in Scotland, we have our own version. We have two horses, one of which wants to take a particular course, towards its own vision of how the country should be run. Meanwhile, the other horse is sitting down on the tarmac demanding to be hitched to a different cart.
As the physicists amongst you will have noticed, this causes certain problems. For normal politics to work, for politicians to be able to debate commonplace issues like health, education and transport, the constitutional questions must be settled. What the basic framework of a state is, and where its borders lie, matters far more than any policy on schools or hospitals. Until these questions are broadly agreed across the political class, normal politics will take a back seat.
No one can play a game without knowing what the rules are. If the two sides disagree about what the rules should be and try to make it up as they go along, you can be sure that most of their time will be spent arguing about them.
The SNP and Labour are the only two contenders for power, and only one of them wants to work inside the current framework. The other finds little real ideological difference between it and its rival, only its commitment to tear up the current rules. Scottish politics is a carve-up between an unreflective centre-left party that believes in independence and an unthinking centre-left party that believes in unionism.
In post-devolution Scotland, we’ve managed to invert the usual model of politics. Usually, a country is governed by a political system where the rules are fixed, but the policies swing between two visions. Whereas Scotland’s main parties are agreed on their policies, and instead tug the constitution to and fro. It is a ludicrous way of doing things. It is as if UKIP were always the large minority party at Westminster, unable to win independence from the EU, but not interested in much else.
Nothing can be done while the Scottish question remains unsettled. Politics up here is not a left-right battle, nor a Millian tug between progress and reaction. Constitutional matters are the big battleground, and the battles of ideology are reduced to nothing but piddling little disputes over banning airguns and happy hours. The elephant in the room will need to be kicked out before there’s any space for the parties to spread out.
Scotland can’t afford this wrangling and indecision. We have swathes of the country stuck in a rotting world of twentieth-century socialism, unable to move on. Welfarism has turned parts of the country into deserts of opportunity. The Scottish education system used to be something we prided ourselves on. Now, it is only the deluded who think so.
Amongst the political class, there's no desire to think outside the old consensus of soft leftism. There are no new ideas, not even any curiosity about different ways of doing things. We trudge on, obsessed with the constitutional question, trying to solve deep-rooted social problems by passing ever more prohibitions, more directives, more initiatives, and failing to see that the levers of power are clanking freely in mid-air.
There is no appetite in the country for any shift away from the mushy socialism that 80% of the Parliament backs, not while the constitutional question hangs over it all. Scottish politics is stagnant, unwilling to decide firmly whether it wants independence or not, and until it does, unable to move on from it. But the great obstacle is that independence can count on the unyielding support of about 30% of the population, just as it has for decades, which guarantees both that the SNP will remain a major party and that it won’t win a referendum.
Unless we decide, and both sides accept the constitution, there’s no chance of any other kind of progress. The two parties crowd together on policy, sticking close to the populist consensus, so as to save ammunition for the big struggle. It’s an endurance contest, the two sides trying to wear each other down until one gives in. It is a waste of time that we really don’t have.
Scotland produces many talented, clever, interesting people who can do great things, as a quick look around London will tell you. Until we figure out what we want to be as a country, we'll stay squabbling in the middle of the road.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
The Patriot Game
As we glide towards the next full-blown campaign for US President, we can expect the partisanship to drift westwards across the Atlantic. Once the no-hopers start to drop out, British pundits will start to pick their favourites and snarl it out at one another - almost as if Clinton, Obama and Giuliani were fighting for votes in the West Midlands, rather than the Mid-West.
The Right gets particularly excited about this. For many, America has become an icon of all that is good in the world, the last bastion of civilised values in Christendom. Most pick their favoured candidates on the basis of they think what America needs, whether it’s a more eloquent figurehead, a slashing of the pork-laden federal government, a new drive for educational reform or a refocusing of the battle against Islamism.
The problem is that the ideologues engage in the presidential race from the wrong shore of the Atlantic. British right-wingers pick from the menu of Republican candidates according to which they think would be the best for America. Few would think any differently about Presidential politics if they weren’t a British subject at all, but loyal to the Stars and Stripes.
George Orwell once noted how an ideologues will often transfer his nationalism to a foreign symbol of his beliefs. In Orwell's day, intellectuals played at being African or Russian patriots, showing off their anti-imperialism or their solidarity with the workers’ state. Throughout the Cold War, many Soviet sympathisers here became outright Russophiles, and even now, with Russia governed by gangster capitalism, the old fellow-travellers still argue for Putin and Mother Russia as fervently as they did thirty years ago.
Now, the ideologues of the Right feel much the same way about their champion that the hard Left felt about theirs. “The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organisation, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort” wrote Orwell. ‘Anti-American’ being the customary one today.
The modern Right forgets that we are not American, and what is good for one country is not necessarily good for its allies. The history of the last few years is enough to show that.
For a proper anti-America leftie, there has been no better advert for the cause than George Bush. Under his watch, America has become so associated with stupidity, arrogance and incompetence that a distaste for our Stateside cousins has become de rigeur in the circles that consider themselves polite. As Bush enters the closing straights, everyone is edging away from the 43rd President of the United States like from a mad, rambling bore at a party.
As far as the US is concerned, it has had few stauncher allies than Tony Blair. From the days after September 11th when NATO, under pressure from the UK, invoked its mutual-defence obligations for the first time, through six years of solidarity over Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain and America were barely separable. In all the areas that Washington foreign policy makers care about, Blair was keen to hitch Britain to the American position, occasionally pulling in a particular direction, but otherwise happy to roll alongside its ally.
Thing is, even though Tony Blair became the preferred choice of even the most right-wing Republicans, none of his friends in Washington would ever have wanted him to have power in their country. A man who supports higher taxes, gay marriage, nationalised medicine…? In a Presidential race he’d have been a comedy act in the first stage, someone to briefly raise the hopes of liberal Democrats, and to soon drop out.
But of course, those friends of Tony’s understood that all that is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how ideologically pure your allies are, or how they’d get along with your party rank-and-file. What matters, if you value an alliance, is to find presidents and prime ministers who strengthen and enhance that alliance.
Over here, the pro-American Right should think carefully about this. If its columnists and pundits want to do a little good, they should be figuring out which of the candidates would help the alliance recover from the humiliation of the Bush years.
Atlanticists on this side of the pond don’t need another Republican he-man like Rudy Giuliani. Whatever his merits might be for America, and however civilizing it will be for the Republicans to be led into battle by a man who once lived with two gay men and a Chihuahua, a President Giuliani would look like more of the same.
We Atlanticists need an alliance that’s again a source of pride, not of embarrassment. A president who can remind us that America is the offspring of Enlightenment Europe, not simply a weird backwater, filled with dim hicks and tub-thumping religious nutters. We need a president who’s recognisably one of us, not some kind of semi-alien being from a very definitely foreign country.
We need a President Obama. Regardless of whether you’d vote for him yourself, he is the one candidate who can refresh the way the US looks and sounds. Right now, that’s what the true friends of America need.
The Right gets particularly excited about this. For many, America has become an icon of all that is good in the world, the last bastion of civilised values in Christendom. Most pick their favoured candidates on the basis of they think what America needs, whether it’s a more eloquent figurehead, a slashing of the pork-laden federal government, a new drive for educational reform or a refocusing of the battle against Islamism.
The problem is that the ideologues engage in the presidential race from the wrong shore of the Atlantic. British right-wingers pick from the menu of Republican candidates according to which they think would be the best for America. Few would think any differently about Presidential politics if they weren’t a British subject at all, but loyal to the Stars and Stripes.
George Orwell once noted how an ideologues will often transfer his nationalism to a foreign symbol of his beliefs. In Orwell's day, intellectuals played at being African or Russian patriots, showing off their anti-imperialism or their solidarity with the workers’ state. Throughout the Cold War, many Soviet sympathisers here became outright Russophiles, and even now, with Russia governed by gangster capitalism, the old fellow-travellers still argue for Putin and Mother Russia as fervently as they did thirty years ago.
Now, the ideologues of the Right feel much the same way about their champion that the hard Left felt about theirs. “The smallest slur upon his own unit, or any implied praise of a rival organisation, fills him with uneasiness which he can only relieve by making some sharp retort” wrote Orwell. ‘Anti-American’ being the customary one today.
The modern Right forgets that we are not American, and what is good for one country is not necessarily good for its allies. The history of the last few years is enough to show that.
For a proper anti-America leftie, there has been no better advert for the cause than George Bush. Under his watch, America has become so associated with stupidity, arrogance and incompetence that a distaste for our Stateside cousins has become de rigeur in the circles that consider themselves polite. As Bush enters the closing straights, everyone is edging away from the 43rd President of the United States like from a mad, rambling bore at a party.
As far as the US is concerned, it has had few stauncher allies than Tony Blair. From the days after September 11th when NATO, under pressure from the UK, invoked its mutual-defence obligations for the first time, through six years of solidarity over Afghanistan and Iraq, Britain and America were barely separable. In all the areas that Washington foreign policy makers care about, Blair was keen to hitch Britain to the American position, occasionally pulling in a particular direction, but otherwise happy to roll alongside its ally.
Thing is, even though Tony Blair became the preferred choice of even the most right-wing Republicans, none of his friends in Washington would ever have wanted him to have power in their country. A man who supports higher taxes, gay marriage, nationalised medicine…? In a Presidential race he’d have been a comedy act in the first stage, someone to briefly raise the hopes of liberal Democrats, and to soon drop out.
But of course, those friends of Tony’s understood that all that is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how ideologically pure your allies are, or how they’d get along with your party rank-and-file. What matters, if you value an alliance, is to find presidents and prime ministers who strengthen and enhance that alliance.
Over here, the pro-American Right should think carefully about this. If its columnists and pundits want to do a little good, they should be figuring out which of the candidates would help the alliance recover from the humiliation of the Bush years.
Atlanticists on this side of the pond don’t need another Republican he-man like Rudy Giuliani. Whatever his merits might be for America, and however civilizing it will be for the Republicans to be led into battle by a man who once lived with two gay men and a Chihuahua, a President Giuliani would look like more of the same.
We Atlanticists need an alliance that’s again a source of pride, not of embarrassment. A president who can remind us that America is the offspring of Enlightenment Europe, not simply a weird backwater, filled with dim hicks and tub-thumping religious nutters. We need a president who’s recognisably one of us, not some kind of semi-alien being from a very definitely foreign country.
We need a President Obama. Regardless of whether you’d vote for him yourself, he is the one candidate who can refresh the way the US looks and sounds. Right now, that’s what the true friends of America need.
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