Nobody Knows Anything

Nobody Knows Anything

It may be only for this weekend, it may be an anomaly in the polling, it may not take account of the fearsome intelligence of local campaigning in key marginals as practised by the dark artists of the Tory Party Machine…but what was universally assumed to be a Dead Cert Tory Landslide in the General Election is looking like being a bit of a nail-biter.  It looks like the Tory party have pulled off the trick, for the third time, (Better Together in Indyref 14, Remain in EUref16), of turning an unassailable lead into a narrow squeak…and that the hung parliament that everyone thought was going to happen in 2015 actually might happen this time instead.

Now, bearing in mind what happened in 2014, when one poll result set the Hearts of Oak aflutter...and mobilised the unionists, this may just be a blip, but even if that is all it is, it is beginning to look like “Received Political Wisdom” is fish and chip paper. If nothing else, if Theresa May ends up delivering a majority that will make every vote on Brexit into a constitutional crisis, leave alone a SMALLER majority than now, which leaves the SNP anywhere near a “balance of power” situation (a few by-elections permitting) then every single assumption that the political classes have made about the prospect of Tory hegemony in the UK for the foreseeable future is, like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove caught in the headlights of their unexpected and unwanted Brexit victory last year, left mumbling pale faced and traumatised: “Christ on a bike!  That wasn’t supposed to happen!”

Brexit suddenly isn’t the settled will of anyone anymore…the party in government can’t rely on an electoral boost from a terrorist outrage, the Labour Party might find themselves winning a on a Right Wing Issue like Police numbers with a Left Wing (ish) manifesto.  And here in Scotland, we might well find that the historic “SNP Tsunami” of two years ago leaves us with a Thatcher era number of Tory MPs with the SNP having directly replaced Labour, virtually seat for seat, as a somewhat despised “establishment” party of devolution…the “feeble fifty” de nos jours. 

Honest to God, I’ve no idea what’s happening.  I’m thinking of trading in the Crystal Ball for a Ouija Board.

Maybe part of it is to do with history having a sense of humour: that the democratising advent of social media, like the advent of printing five hundred years ago, is making the world both more promising and more scary at the same time. Maybe Twitter and Facebook and the demon algorithms aren’t so much (or not only) making politics less polite and more open, but are also sealing it in a bubble of specific leisure activity…that this hermetic form of what has always been “show business for ugly people” is now entirely divorced, in the public mind, from the “real world.”

Certainly, from the Socialists in France, the Democrats in the USA and the SPD in Germany to the Labour party in Scotland (to name only the most recent casualties) it is the parties of Social Democracy that have suffered the most from the sundering of the two parts of all of their names.  The Social, with all the work and housing and shopping, is over HERE…and the Democracy, with all the politics and opinions and shit, is WAY over there on Facebook…and paradoxically, it is the comparatively de –classed cohorts of North London Radical Labour who find themselves, in England, wholly against expectation, to be doing much better, at this moment, than I’m sure they ever thought was possible. 

(I don’t think John and Jeremy had any expectation of EVER assuming the offices of state, any more the afore-mentioned Boris and Michael saw themselves as the signatories of an ACTUAL suicide pact for the British economy.)

People voted for Trump…and Macron...and maybe will for Jeremy…and maybe even for Oor Nicola…not just because they might have actually WANTED to be represented by a thuggish moron, a slippery unknown, a retired geography teacher and a National Treasure respectively…but because, what they hell, it’s just Facebook.  Everything is unfixably crap, democracy is a crock of shit, so we might as well be entertained…

This state of the public zeitgeist, would be, of course, for fascists and populists, a consummation devoutly to be wished…and if this is anything like what is going on, it probably has something to do with the breakdown of the neo-Liberal Globalisation project, and the consequent exposure of the moral vacuum at the heart of it…just as Islamo-fascist terrorism does.

Global trends have local consequences.  One of them, on these islands, has been the rise of nationalisms in Scotland and England, with what optimists like Robin McAlpine have described as “Trade Unionism for the People” on the one hand, and Never-Neverland pre-Suez Nostalgia on the other.  Maybe everyone is voting for time machines, either to fling us into a bright, imagined future or into the warm glow of the imagined past.  I still think of the Glasgow Taxi Driver who told me voted to Leave the EU because he wanted to restore Full Employment on the Clyde…”because we used to have that before we joined.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Maybe the present tense, for young and old, is unbearable. Maybe there’s nothing new in this. Maybe this discontent is a constant of our human condition.  Maybe I should stop there before I get too philosophical. Maybe, like William Goldman so wisely said about trying to predict successful movies in Hollywood, “Nobody Knows Anything.” As a fully paid up member of the Political Nerd Club I am probably entirely unqualified to comment. All I know for certain about this election, this weekend anyway, is that the way it’s shaping up is making me feel very excited and very, very old…all at the same time.

Fasten your Seatbelts

Two weeks in, and it is already clear that this is going to be a challenging General Election for the SNP. They have been incumbent in Holyrood for a very long time now - ten years old is ancient for a government -and there is some tiredness and creaking of ministerial knee joints creeping in. Also, a strange paradox of their success since 2011, peaking in 2015 in electoral terms, of the sheer profile and impact they’ve achieved in Scottish life , is that they are more truly accountable to the electorate than at any time in the past. Indeed, they are more vulnerable to democratic scrutiny than any Scottish administration has ever been.

This democratic oversight and parliamentary pressure is, despite tribal sensitivities, a good thing overall.  Governments in Scotland have never really been accountable to anyone before…being too far away from London to appear on the radar most of the time, and immune to popular pressure at home.  A succession of oligarchies have ruled in Scotland (with permission from London) since the Union, and none have ever been especially accountable to a specifically Scottish electorate.  Till now.

And the SNP are indeed feeling the immediate pressure.  They have an organised, motivated, energised Tory Party focusing the Unionist vote in a way that has never been so electorally coherent as it is now.  They also, as of May 11^th, have a UK Labour manifesto that may well be attractive to those people on the left in Scotland for whom a socialist agenda underlies the aspiration for independence, for whom the Yes movement is a means and not an end. There may be a disconnect between Corbyn’s vision and the Follow-the-other –lot’s-leader Unionism that Scottish Labour are pursuing, but that is of little importance beside the overwhelming logic, so far, of the General Election campaign as it is playing out in Scotland so far: it is ALL about the SNP.

If, until a few years ago, the territory of Scottish politics, and its territorial ferocity was all about who was the “REAL” opposition to the Tories, Labour or the SNP, now the governing logic is a fight for who occupies the lead opposition spot to the SNP, the Tories or Labour…with Willie Rennie yapping for attention in the background. All the pressure, and certainly all the vitriol, is going to be concentrated not against the Tories and their lunatic attempt to cancel economic and political reality in a wave of Little England blethers, but against that other “bloody difficult woman.”

None of this feels especially healthy or democratically enlightening.  It feels like a rather sick, narrow world to inhabit for the next four weeks. But looking forward, it may well be that the current concentration of furious focus on the SNP on the one hand, and the last chance saloon for any kind of social decency in the UK as embodied by Jeremy Corbyn, may both benefit the Nats in the longer term.  For one thing, this is surely peak Tory in Scotland.  It will surely be very difficult to recruit and maintain many more angry Union diehards than are being recruited right now..not when Brexit bites, not when the Barnett Formula comes under some serious pressure as tax revenues collapse and inflation surges…as both may well do in the next couple of years.  (Why do you think the Tories didn’t want to risk hanging on till 2020 before putting Brexit to the electoral test?)  As for the hopes for a real change of direction in the social disintegration and polarisation of the UK, these hopes now rest with Labour overturning a huge Tory lead in the opinion polls and forming a government in Westminster very much against their own expectations, let alone probability.

Peak Unionist and a progressive UK in the last chance saloon. While the pressure in the present tense may all be on the SNP, who will inevitably lose some of the seats they won in 2015, historically, the pressure is all the other way.  This is on the left and the right, the strongest the forces of the Union look like being for the foreseeable future.  Realistically, there was probably never a prospect of the In dependence project taking the next step till the prospect of Tory little England for that foreseeable future stared us balefully in the face.  The odds overwhelmingly are that this is exactly the long dark tunnel we’ll be looking into on June 9^th. If the SNP feel some pressure from the left in the meantime, and can do an exact head count of the Unionist opposition while they’re at it, this may be no bad thing for them in the long or even medium term.

The next four weeks, however, will be a bumpy, angry ride.