CommonSpace columnist and Common Weal director Robin McAlpine says Scotland’s town hall spirit has continued post-indyref and deserves far more credit
STANDING in the rain, feet sinking into the marshy ground, we’ve stopped to feed the wild mountain goats of the New Galloway forrest. I feel really positive, good about what’s happening in Scotland – and it’s not even because of the unbearably cute baby goats.
Excessive positivity about politics in Scotland is not something I’ve been accused of over the last few weeks . I should probably know better – elections are rotten times for political thinking, ambition and vision – but the dull, grinding sound of the machine doing what the machine does isn’t much good for putting a spring into your step.
So thank goodness for the Stranraer Festival of Politics , a weekend-long celebration of what Scotland became during its recent political awakening and a reminder of what politics should be about.
Thank goodness for the Stranraer Festival of Politics , a weekend-long celebration of what Scotland became during its recent political awakening and a reminder of what politics should be about.
Over three days the organisers managed to attract a really interesting and varied group of thinkers and politicians who covered the political spectrum (though with a bit of a weighting towards the pro-independence left).
As with so much that has happened in recent years, it was done on a shoestring budget by people who are making it up as they go along, taking a chance by believing that anyone will care. Thank the lord that they do.
Activists (and their thrawn belief that people WILL care) have dragged me from Stranraer to Elgin in recent months, mainly to talk about the Book of Ideas. I can’t thank them enough. The busy pub function rooms, town halls, cafes and meeting rooms keep me energised throughout the ‘three steps forward, two steps back’ exhaustion of social activism.
But what is so important about what is still happening in Scotland just now is that it challenges so much perceived wisdom about what politics is and what government is about.
What could be called the standard model of western political strategy evolved in particular from the 1970s onwards – and it is a disease passing itself off as a diagnoses. It is based on a strange assumption that citizens are neither individuals nor a community.
They are not a community because they are atomised consumers, acting in self interest. Politics is BORING. Shopping is FUN. Things that let me do things I find FUN are GOOD. So good politics lets me SHOP!
What is so important about what is still happening in Scotland just now is that it challenges so much perceived wisdom about what politics is and what government is about.
But neither are they individuals because they can only be understood as a herd. What people think as individuals isn’t particularly important because only when they are aggregated up to the scale of the herd do their aggregated views mean anything.
So you go to a shopping mall you didn’t ask for and that proves you wanted it, while your anger at the decline of your high street isn’t real because on aggregate, people like shopping malls – even if it is because there is no high street left.
If you ask people if they like low pay they say no. If you explain to them that low tax contributes to low pay and that shopping malls and deregulated banks have done much of the rest of the job, they understand it.
And still, the aggregated herd is somehow made to look like it is more reactionary, more venal and less interested than it is in its individual bits. If you think this is just my opinion, have a close look at the incredibly important research carried out by Tom Crompton for the Common Cause Foundation .
This rigorously sound piece of research shows that 74 per cent of the British population place greater importance on compassionate values than on selfish ones. But – crucially – 77 per cent of us believe that our fellow citizens are substantially more driven by selfish values than is actually true.
This standard model of western politics has made pollsters wealthy and influential and has cemented the role of the professional political strategist – and it is wholly bought into by the mainstream media.
So we’re all nice people who have been persuaded (by pollsters, by the Daily Mail, by Tony Blair) that everyone else is nasty. We’ve been aggregated into a thuggish caricature of who we really are. And as the standard model of politics keeps chasing after the thuggish caricature, it keeps reinforcing it.
For example, do you know that there has never been a British Social Attitudes survey which has shown support for cutting tax at more than 12 per cent of the population ? And yet literally every mainstream political party believes that cutting tax is popular.
Thus it is that you will have read many columnists in the Scotsman (who seem particularly obsessed with the issue) who go on and on about how the SNP ‘collapsed’ in the polls because of its Penny for Scotland policy back in 1999. You will read a lot less about how it achieved its then second highest vote share in Scotland ever as a result of the ‘collapse’ (only at the peak of the oil boom in the 1970s did they gain a higher vote).
And you will read virtually nothing about how its vote dropped very substantially in the next election when it abandoned the policy.
This standard model of western politics has made pollsters wealthy and influential and has cemented the role of the professional political strategist – and it is wholly bought into by the mainstream media (which, if anything, understands citizens even less than political strategists do).
This model of politics almost shaped the Yes campaign. I spoke to a Yes Scotland strategist early on in the campaign who told me (against all the evidence I could see) that the campaign would be won or lost on the basis of the ‘aspirational middle classes’. Pollsters held fringe meetings at SNP conferences to tell them the same thing.
I spoke to a Yes Scotland strategist early on in the campaign who told me (against all the evidence I could see) that the campaign would be won or lost on the basis of the ‘aspirational middle classes’.
Thankfully, a rampaging army of total amateurs didn’t agree. To everyone’s surprise (mine included) they started to fill town halls all over Scotland which were packed out with people who were interested in hearing about something a bit more than how shopping would be protected in an independent Scotland.
It wasn’t really Yes Scotland which pushed a lot of the ideas that captured and shaped the independence campaign. In fact, in some instances it was despite it. The argument that only the already converted were influenced by the town halls is hard to sustain – the major shifts towards independence did not occur because of what was in the mainstream media.
I’ve heard a couple of the more rightwing independence supporters pointing out that the town hall campaign didn’t win us independence. No, but if they hadn’t done it we’d have lost 60 – 40 and the whole independence thing would be over by now.
The research Common Weal published last week on the composition of the Yes campaign told us a lot of really interesting things. I’d love to see some more research on what it was that really changed people’s minds. I suspect that the way the messages from town halls and independent campaigning groups spread via social networks and social media was crucial.
I believe very strongly that what Scotland is now – a country transformed politically – is in large part a function of what happened in town halls and what was done by excited, energised members of the public.
Thankfully, a rampaging army of total amateurs didn’t agree. To everyone’s surprise they started to fill town halls all over Scotland which were packed out with people.
And it hasn’t stopped. There are few months since the referendum ended where I’ve not been invited to talk in one town hall or another (and often to quite a few in a month). These are the places where a lot of the momentum behind land reform emerged towards the end of last year. They are driving opposition to both fracking and TTIP .
And if my instincts on this are correct, they’re soon going to be pushing a much more interesting and progressive economic agenda – the questions which seem to dominate the Q&A sessions that invariably close these meetings.
So my sincere thanks go out to the people who put their time in to making the Stranraer Festival of Politics such a success. And to the many autonomous Common Weal groups, Global Justice Now and other activists who are setting up meetings all the time.
And from me, a special thanks to the women of the Women Anti Austerity Action Group, a collection of middle-aged women from rural Fife whom you would almost certainly mistake for WRI members but who ran an absolutely cracking town hall meeting this month (sausage rolls and home baking included). It was a brilliant night.
Activists are not irrelevant because they care. People who go to political meetings are not irrelevant because they care. Far from being the people to ignore when you try to think about Scotland’s future, they are the people to celebrate.
Activists are not irrelevant because they care. People who go to political meetings are not irrelevant because they care. Far from being the people to ignore when you try to think about Scotland’s future, they are the people to celebrate.
They got us here. It may well be them who get us to the next place we go.
The CommonSpace opinion section is an open platform for anyone who wants to voice their views and does not represent the editorial position of CommonSpace itself. If you’d like to have a piece published, email CommonSpace editor Angela Haggerty at angela@common.scot
Picture courtesy of Robin McAlpine