Because I am equally unnerved by the response. Those who oppose hard and far-right politics are seeking to use techniques from a different era – appeals to reason by summits of establishment elites, attempts at quarantine and isolation, moral broadsides.
None of this is working or has any chance of working. Elite lectures are the problem, not the solution. Isolation is over; it isn’t possible now. Trying to persuade people out of this by telling them they’re bad people is only making things worse.
There is only one possible solution – we need to tell a better story about people’s lives. We have given up even pretending that the lives of an awful lot of people in this country are going to get better.
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Instead, we tell them stories about how life is going to get better for those for whom life is already good – landlords, chief executives, financiers, quango types. When the Scottish Government says “GDP growth is the number one priority”, that doesn’t mean us. It doesn’t mean citizens.
We are still living off trickle-down economics. What do we get out of GDP growth? Better public services, apparently. Do the politicians know that GDP has been growing almost uninterrupted for 40 years? When’s it going to work?
We see the wealthy get special treatment, but we don’t see our public services getting better and we don’t see our wages rising. The professional management classes (the people who actually run the country and its economy) do well out of this. Everyone else?
We need to get our heads straight. If you have a total household income of £35,000, you’re doing reasonably well in Scotland. About six out of 10 Scottish households earn less than you do.
And yet if your income had kept pace with inflation since devolution, you’d be earning about £48,000. And if your income had kept pace with GDP you would be earning about £60,000. You have to be in the top one or two per cent of earners in Scotland before you’re not losing out from GDP growth.
So if a government says “this is our primary purpose in office,” it is telling most people that it doesn’t care about their lives. In pursuit of economic growth, ordinary people know that the Scottish Government is going to end up pushing up their rent or their mortgage by much more than they’ll gain out of landlord GDP trickling down. It’s all they’ve ever known.
This is the problem; politics as usual has absolutely no story about our future. The only future they can see is the present with some tweaks. Politicians of almost all stripes have bought into the idea that politics is just a technocratic management process which involves “choices” based on “values”, but only at the margins.
Otherwise, they simply audition as the best candidate to manage the machine. All that politics does now is that every five years it shuffles the faces telling you that GDP is the only thing that really matters, each election the vainglorious pursuit of a better manager.
Brown would manage things better than Blair, who fixed Major’s messes, until Cameron arrived to manage Brown’s mistakes away. May would repair what Cameron did, Johnson would repair what all of them did. Truss basically did an extreme version of the same which Sunak had to “fix” before the solution was Starmer – which now has its own solution in Burnham…
Scotland is no better.
The promises do not even nearly match up to many people’s experience of life. Nicola Sturgeon didn’t manage government in a way that made her promises real, so John Swinney is dropping the promises altogether.
And the ruling class’s latest wheeze? Rapidly destroy jobs so the rich can get much, much richer. They call it AI. It is going to free up your leisure time – with which you can forage for food.
All of this is playing with fire and has been for a long time. None of it is truthful. It is not true that GDP growth will lead to better public services if the owners of that growth export it abroad.
Between devolution and 2021 (when the Scottish Government stopped publishing the figures), £277 billion was extracted from the Scottish economy because of overseas ownership. This is basically the biggest leakage of wealth in the developed world by a long, long margin.
Foreign direct investment-based GDP growth is exactly why the Scottish Government is today paying the wages of a workforce that should be building busses.
Yet this is still, still after all this time, the only vision we have.
What does it look like from “out there”? It looks like our First Minister debasing himself in front of a tyrant on behalf of the Japanese, American, French, and British corporations which own almost all of Scotland’s whisky industry, shovelling our wealth out the door to their shareholders.
The left has been little better, a whine about all the things we want stopped, tinged with a significant degree of disdain for those who don’t have our university education. Environmentalists seem to have a view of the future which is “this, but with some of the things that make you happy taken away”.
And the dominant view in the leadership of the independence cause since 2011 has been that independence is not a “vision thing”. It steadfastly refuses to imagine an independent Scotland that is really any different from the present. That was the whole message of the Growth Commission.
(Thankfully, during the independence referendum, the grassroots of the movement ignored the politicians and did the vision thing anyway. Make no mistake, it saved our bacon big time in what would otherwise have been a tedious and soul-sapping campaign.)
Which means that if no-one is telling you a story about your future which is attractive, you’ll take what you can get. A story which puts you in the centre as a victim of a liberal elite that cares about immigrants more than you will just have to do.
At least its least a story. It at least tries (dishonestly) to explain to people why their lives feel rubbish (without saying GDP), to try to explain the sense you get when you’re stuck in overpriced substandard houses and are managed through a clinical regime of antidepressants while working in an insecure labour market.
That is something like the reality of life for a very large number of people, not just the very poor – and we have nothing to say to them. Nothing of value at least.
At this point, a lecture or a stern telling-off or a boycott is utterly pointless. Saying “GDP’ to them is contemptuous.
If we can’t persuade them we give half a damn about them and their lives, and that we’ve got some kind of plan for making their lives better which stretches a lot further than “we’ll make the rich richer first and see what happens”, this horror will be our future.
