If Lord Ashcroft’s polling  is correct, Labour faces an unprecedented defeat in Scotland at May’s general election. As the party struggles to maintain its heartlands north of the border it’s high time these long neglected constituencies made their voices heard. 

The full implications of such an implosion would represent the death of Scottish Labour as we know it. Certainly, the party would have to genuinely re-invent itself. It would become impossible for potential future leaders like Kezia Dugdale to accept a role that, even in the hands of such unscrupulous opportunists as Murphy and McTernan, has become entirely compromised by the pressures of union.

But a uniform swing of 25 points across Scotland to the SNP would do something far greater. It would mean that no party would be able to lay claim to representing both Scotland and the UK. Just as with the Liberals, the Tories, so now with Labour: a party that once did exceptionally well in Scotland is facing terminal decline.

This brings with it certain problems for the future of Scottish politics: such dominance from a disciplined, broad and occasionally eccentric SNP cannot speak for so many, without the release of such pressure through independence sooner rather than later. The danger is that devolution, or even full-blooded Home Rule, simply allows another chance for a complacent social democratic party to cosy up to all sources of power in Scotland. From London an offering will become apparent: the consolation prize for not gaining independence will be full control of the Scottish establishment. Within clear economic parameters.

For an example of what such dominance can do we need only look at the early years of devolution. That period of hubris and inertia is at the root of Labour’s current crisis. The flow of prominent, credible, political figures out of Scotland stopped a generation ago. Gordon Brown, the last of this group to remain standing, is still being treated as a kind of prophetic genius, despite his own notorious failure to comprehend losing the Scottish Parliament in 2007, and his impending retirement. Faced with an insurgency at the level such polls predict, a moribund party can do little other than repeat old homilies and hope for damage limitation in the form of quiet tactical voting.

The demise of Labour in Scotland will be the end of an auld song, certainly. But this is a party that has suffocated an authentic British left for a century: its earliest success in Westminster saw it ditch Home Rule and the peripheral corners of the British Isles that were its original source. Similarly its long, complex and fraught relationship with the trade unions, its complicity in the City’s dominance of the British economy and its firm commitment to Atlanticism have finally tied the party in a knot of its own contradictions. It remains trapped and entirely unable to comprehend what has happened in a country that it once knew so well. The crowning insights of Labour’s election strategy, it would seem, are that Scots like public spending and don’t like the Tories. All that is left to complete such ingenious messaging is to drape it in the saltire.

But this is far from unique to Scotland: for a generation Labour has been a party of the ‘extreme centre’, struggling to trace its steps back from the heart of power to the far corners of these isles and its roots. The extent of its impending collapse can only be mitigated by how well it squares the circle of Westminster electoral maths. Torn between the focus groups of Kettering and unrepentant socialists on the Clyde, it may, somehow, cling on to centralised power, but that very act will only make it less able to connect with the provinces, those communities still so distant from power.

Within the union, under a Labour party that has painted itself blue and white, we are told that Scotland can become the ‘fairest nation on earth’. At the heart of that is a transparent and flawed reading of Yes rhetoric, premised on the assumption that all that the past few years have proved is that Scots are daft enough to vote for anything, if it’s vaguely nationalist and social democratic. The disdain, at a strategic level, is palpable. This distance between Labour and the people is exposed as vast. It was not the promises of politicians that defined 2014, but the thrill of collective action and a tangible, definable political goal.

The referendum did something irrevocable to Scotland that can only be embedded by continued political movement: that’s what it thrives on. It placed itself at the centre of a vast and radical political event, it came within a ten point margin of breaking apart one of the world’s largest economies and most influential states. That the referendum is now being seen in the light of numerous struggles: for autonomy, for an end to austerity: for alternatives, that are now gripping Europe, is unsurprising.

Syriza’s recent victory bears little comparison to UK politics. However the most intriguing story that lay behind that remarkable event was the drastic change in the fortunes of the New Labour-esque PASOK, that went from party of government to fringe status, with only 5 per cent of the vote. The events still unfolding in Greece are as much about the systemic failure of social democracy in Europe as they are about new left insurgency.

While on most issues the SNP remains anchored to the political centre, modulated perhaps by the egalitarian rhetoric that is a staple of Scots public life, its policies on certain issues provide the kind of leverage that have the potential to unlock the political system. Nicola Sturgeon recognises the value of appearing on the Andrew Marr show to talk about shaking up the British establishment. In the process of carrying out the referendum the party inadvertently adopted a more radical posture than it intended: something of an inevitability when the full force of the political and financial establishment of the world’s sixth largest economy is bearing down upon you.

The truth that the SNP forgets at its peril, is that such a dynamic was one that converted many Scots to the prospect of independence. It awoke something that is perhaps far deeper than party political conviction, or even national identity. It took a set of people, the Scottish working class and told them that they mattered. That their dignity was central.

Of course, unlike the strange new radicals elsewhere, the SNP is blessed on two fronts. Within its ranks it can maintain a taut discipline. Thanks to the overriding aim of independence significant ideological tensions only rarely surface for public view. Secondly, its dominance of the Scottish Parliament allows it to maintain credibility in power while avoiding playing its hand on the most definitive ideological question of all: the economy. Rather than taking a gamble on the forcing of such a hand, British politicians offered a nakedly opportunistic fudge in the form the Smith Commission, at the heart of which is a desire to force higher levels of income tax on Scotland to provide a politically acceptable line on better services to voters in rUK.

The great political challenge that Europe currently faces is relevant here. By far the most intense pain of the Eurozone crisis was felt largely on the periphery. In Ireland, in Portugal, in southern Spain and particularly in Greece. One election has inverted the dynamic: the voice of the periphery, in the form of a new and radical Greek government is loud and clear. It says to the distant, centralised authorities that dreamt up austerity, that their policy has failed. That the logic of centre-right and centre-left politics has lost legitimacy in the eyes of the people. Of course the notion of such legitimacy itself, means very little to central banks or supranational institutions, but without it the entire edifice is insecure. Cracks are appearing in both the European and the British union, because their own political and economic orthodoxy insisted that the centre must stop talking to the periphery. Today, the centre cannot hold.

The term radical, derived from the Latin radix (root) contains its own inherent logic. Change that doesn’t begin at home rarely has the ability to travel far. The minute that the SNP forgets that, its steady unravelling of the union becomes a hollow project. The most important question for the party is not in fact a constitutional one. Rather, it is this. If, as Lord Ashcroft suggests, a substantial tranche of seats in the still post-industrial heartlands of central Scotland change hands, what will be different? If, as the polls predict, Coatbridge (represented by Labour since 1935) moves to the SNP, what will the party do for the lives of its inhabitants? What might be the greater significance of ending eighty years of the same ‘x’ in the same box? Will it make their participation in politics central? Will it search for policies to change the vast swathes of central Scotland that remain trapped in a precarious, economically bleak stasis?

If the SNP fails to make the demands of these ‘peripheral’ areas of Scotland central to its political platform, its dominance of Scottish politics may yet dissipate as inevitably as Labour’s did post-devolution. Like New Labour, like PASOK, like all social democrats in Europe today, it ignores their voices at its peril. Please stay tuned on the next posts we will be giving away some promo codes for an elo boosting service!

Christopher Silver is currently working on a book, The Case for a Scottish Media, which can be pre-ordered here. 

@silverscotland

For many, 2014 will be remembered for little that is astonishing or newsworthy. Instead a year may or may not be recalled based on the standard meat of what is news for most of us. Break-ups, work, routine, choices; the everyday struggles and hopes that inevitably prove definitive over time. 

Such things are far more important for the vast majority of human beings in Scotland (and across the globe) than the compass of their constitutional status. The nature of an individual’s political community rarely registers as anything other than a muted echo. We participate fleetingly, complain often and attempt an ongoing situating of our selves into the broader scheme of things.

In truth my own, relatively politicised, life has been similar. It’s consisted more of loose engagement: views held, yes. A strong sense that power should be held as close to home as possible. A visceral identification with working class politics, certainly. If 2014 has done nothing other than take that sense of distant affinity and turn it into one of participation and action, then, for me at least, it lives up to the hype with which it was brought in. The impact of all that happened to so many over the past year is something that we can only guess at today. We can however state the following with some certainty: though this year in Scotland registered in the acutely parochial realm of the personal it also reached out to encompass matters of global significance.

We have learned, or perhaps rediscovered, our own audacity. Here I sit reviewing the year, as though I have some kind of editorial authority to do so. I do not. And nor do I receive any compensation for the act, beyond the reward of recognition, the compulsion and thrill of a wider understanding. Such freedom does, however, allow for both excess and bluntness, finding your voice can all too easily mean shouting too loudly. Hence the following, humble, thoughts.

2014 changed me. In this year like all others the perennial challenges listed above have not been absent. Yet nothing has altered me so acutely and brought out such a vast prospect for self-education and, indeed, self-realisation, as this great democratic reawakening. All of this is of course dwarfed by the inspiration that can only stem from witnessing the transformation of others. To rediscover joy at the capacity of one’s fellows is to see the intertwined nature of individual and collective freedom take form. Perhaps that is what so many of us experienced this past summer.

That there were no sunlit uplands to ascend this time is sad, no doubt. Save for this: a far greater, more damaging loss would have been the task of birthing a country with anything other than the most solid majority for independence. We know, being pragmatic, that independence was only ever one step on a long journey, it was never an end in itself. Indeed as a great English radical once said of another struggle for self-determination: what we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. This more complex path is only a guarantee that a tangibly better Scotland must be more profound in its realisation.

A lingering dose of youthful recklessness (the age old delusion that the world in a fresh pair of hands is plastic) may well be to blame for such optimism. And yet at its best 2014 was not simply a summer of love: a framed image of utopian proportions. It was all premised on excitement at the sight of political alternatives, on what was possible. That those of all ages become filled with passions about relatively moderate reform tells a different story to that of congealed youth. Deeper roots anchored what independence might mean: old visions of a just republic, newer forms of radical freedom that embed the change they want to see in the practices of the movement itself.

For despite all those tears of outrage shed by the generations of Scots who have marched against Trident, the Poll Tax, Iraq and a slew of other less famous but equally galling injustices, something has been at work in the land. It drew on a sustained, irrevocable, sense of dissonance. Westminster was not the repressor, it simply sang a different and ever more discordant strain. It still does. This awkward chorale to two different and rarely consolidated audiences will continue for some time. Such was the decision of a majority of the people of Scotland. But few now think that music to be sacred any longer. It will change because the union has become a solely political problem. And politics is, fundamentally, about change.

Out of all this there is something that I hope has become apparent. Action, agency and a slightly illicit sense of power have become common to us on a personal and collective level. Not on some arcane theoretical canvas but here in this very real Scotland. Like many who are now alive with this very different and altered sense of political energy, I am acutely aware of the difficulties this brings, the vast scope of potential disillusionment looms like an ever present lodestone: a constant, somewhat awkward negotiation around the contours of what all this might actually mean. Here in in this country, now.

But the truth is, the movement that Scotland experienced is only particular to the nation in a rather old fashioned sense. As in the 1960s there’s a roch wind gathering force, not just in Scotland, but in the great glen of the world too.

Should Scotland be an independent country? Many, many people think that it should not. Others dissent. It has always struck me as a very short question for a country that I could spend the rest of my years exploring and still struggle to understand: slight though it’s fate and its strangest places might be in the grand scheme of a world in which it still seems unsure of itself.

In contrast, this year, some politicians tried to resuscitate a soiled notion of patriotism: of glory, honour and sacrifice and hills and glens. But if there is a new burst of love for what is here, it does not feel like patriotism, it’s more a particular form of solidarity, of place and community: ever present but seldom recognised. If 2014 witnessed a summer of love, it was far more a rekindling of an old flame than a passionate fling with a repressed identity.

Perhaps this is why throughout the referendum campaign, the sentiment Yes expressed rested somewhere between Hamish Henderson’s socialist anthem Freedom Come a Ye, and the more accessible verses of Dougie MacLean’s Caledonia. A song of radical internationalism and a song of coming home. Two sides of the same coin for a movement that drove towards the idea that we might yet be at home with freedom and our own place in the world.

In the meantime, we are all precarious in this new country, staring down from imagined heights with a kind of mad temerity that would make our ancestors blush. Although I suspect that many would enjoy a quiet chuckle at the sight of so many worthies flustered at the hurly burly of it all.

That said, we should also remember that public life in Scotland has always moved in fits and starts, lurching forward when great events, elections or referenda compel it to, before settling back down into the couthier rhythms of an awkward province. Since September this has not happened. The task for 2015 is to ensure that these past twelve months cannot be written off as an anomaly, that all the networked individuals and movements find ways of not reverting to older, more limiting patterns of thought and action. For the alternative is simply too discordant. It tells us that political difference is to be shunned and that we should come together to back a broken political system.

The creativity, the skill, the patience and openness displayed in abundance last summer has not gone away. Rather, like all surpluses, our current surfeit of political engagement is defined by the fact that we still don’t know what to do with it. The solution to how we apply it must be so much more than party political (and so much more than just a yes/no rut). It must create a new normal in which participation is not simply a management task, but at the crux of all of our, newly politicised, lives.

To inhabit a country often dismissed as parochial and marginal, as a centre of disputatious enlightened social engagement, is to embed the best of the past year and build on it. The coming years will bring massive existential challenges, in Scotland and across the world, we must meet them with the tools we have discovered, the patience, the discipline and the knowledge that our country now thrills with. When standing still is simply not an option this movement is the new reality that we must live. For to do so, even on a personal level, is an act of independence too. 

See you on the other side.

@silverscotland

Photo: Peter McNally