I find myself in surprisingly reflective mood – yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Common Weal. I sent an email to all of our subscribers and have posted it here for anyone who doesn’t subscribe (why not folks?). That was a reflection on what we did over the last ten years.
But what I’m reflecting on personally isn’t what we did so much as the wider environment in which we did it. There was an awful lot of looking-back over the last decade because of the indyref anniversary, but what about the rest of politics? It’s been a chaotic decade. What did I learn from trying to navigate it?
What I’ll do here is pick out a few themes which seem to me to have dominated this last decade and ask what each is doing to our politics and our society. I’m absolutely sure I could pick a whole other list.
But any list that I’d create would start with the four big seismic changes I’ve felt since about 2014 – Scotland’s constitutional polarisation, the rise of social media, the emergence of a new kind of progressive politics and the rise of a new kind of right-wing politics. And of these, I think I’ll just skip the polarisation of Scotland given how much it is discussed.
The one change that I think we’re still underestimating is social media. I was a confirmed sceptic from the outset and it is hard to know where to begin with my objections. For one, asking people to share their every thought unmediated by social interaction is asking to exist inside the darker regions of the human mind. For two, as social animals we get anxious when we feel ourselves being compared with others, so it becomes a no-win arms race.
In our social interaction we have various important body-language buffers which help us deescalate conflict, but these are absent on social media. And since it is ‘shallow messaging’ it is ripe for manipulation. It killed the media (not a good thing).
Plus it is highly addictive. As someone who never did social media but who has known many people with alcohol or drug addiction, I struggle to tell you apart you alcoholics and you heavy social media users. Yeah, I know, your hand is twitching towards your phone by choice like you only had that last drink because you really wanted it and could have not had it if you wanted.
I wasn’t wrong about any of this. If there is an impact I underestimated it’s how fragmented knowledge and information would become. I’m suddenly in a world where my son’s friend’s dad casually drops ‘I don’t believe in evolution’ into the conversation and it all leads back to a YouTube video.
The impact on politics has been devastating, though people in politics never admit this because they are by far the worst addicts of all. They can’t see their addiction as the problem, they think it’s the other people who share their addiction that are the problem. If other people weren’t on social media complaining about Palestine/independence/missing money, take your pick, then everything would be fine
It has made politics much, much more angry, much more divisive, much less plural. People aren’t engaging with opposing ideas, they’re screaming and shouting at them. It has boosted the politics of anger (in an environment of anger, it is the furious who rule) and torn at the social cohesion of shared institutions. It. Is. A. Fucking. Disaster. Whether the addicts admit it or not.
(By the way, if you’re an addict and are coming up with all sorts of other reasons why everything has gone to shit since social media, read this parallel piece on teenage anxiety which shows that literally the only thing that changed at the moment when all the indicators of anxiety started rising sharply was the introduction of social media. The same is true of rage in politics.)
If I was a plutocrat and I wanted to protect my wealth after the financial criss of 2008 I’d invent an ideology designed to split the left in two but down ideological lines that are nothing to do with wealth
This has had major, major impacts. The kinds of things Donald Trump or Robert Jenrick say are only explicable if you accept that social media has normalised extreme opinions. Social activists thought social media would help them organise; I was also sceptical. Did everyone really think the corporations would see this always-on means of communication and say ‘yeah, we’ll leave that space to you poverty and climate campaigners’? In 2014 that was a common view.
Instead we’ve lost our long-standing social institutions and now what has all-but replaced them is saturated with computer-generated advertising content. No-one can reach anyone except through expensive saturation content-bombing. Organising gets harder and harder.
I’ve spent too long commenting on social media here, but you can’t begin to understand the rapid decline in the health of western civilisation without understanding what social media has done. The rise of the hard right is one of its most worrying features, social media giving bad actors the opportunity to turn the failure of neoliberal economics into a grievance directed at people who have nothing to do with it.
These ideologies aren’t even consistent. You knew where a Nazi stood, but the modern far right just adopts policy stances according to what algorithms tell them is getting the clicks. At times rightwing and leftwing anger can be hard to tell apart.
And dead goodness the rise of anger on the left is one of the most corrosive aspects of this last decade. I have tried to stay away from the rights and wrongs of the gender ID debate since as a heterosexual man my views are not likely to be well received. But early on I was greatly alarmed not by the issues but by the means through which the issues were being prosecuted.
Or let me put it another way; blacklists returned with a vengeance. I honestly thought we were winning the fight against blacklists, an awful concept which never occurs in history without great harm being done. The new model of self-generated identity politics (the belief that what you think self-evidently makes you the good person) made it easy to hate the other.
And that’s what it was, hatred. My introduction to this was an article by Shona Craven in the National relating that a woman’s rights meeting had been aggressively picketed by a group of mainly men wearing three-hole balaclavas, shouting insults and banging pots and pans in intimidation. Kansas felt like a long way away.
The older I get the more I realise that I don’t really give a fuck what you believe in the way that I definitely don’t give a fuck what your values are. I care about what you do. If you live a life of friendliness and courtesy to all without prejudice then I don’t really care what your secret prejudices are. If your progressive values pervade your social media but evaporate when the whip’s office calls, your values are worthless.
So my first response isn’t that I want to know what you think a woman is, it’s that I want to know what you will do about it either way and I want to know how you will do it. And if what you are doing is trying to lose people their jobs and destroy their lives because you don’t agree with them, my first response is that you are the problem. You’re certainly not a solution.
If I was a plutocrat and I wanted to protect my wealth after the financial criss of 2008 I’d invent an ideology designed to split the left in two but down ideological lines that are nothing to do with wealth so that we would all stop talking about economic inequality and financial corruption. The left did it for them and they’ve participated with great enthusiasm, unable to believe their luck.
What has united the right has shattered the left – identity politics and blacklists
What has united the right has shattered the left – identity politics and blacklists. It has been an unmitigated disaster in terms of big issues like poverty and climate change. In ten years we seem to have replaced class solidarity with ‘allyship’, except allyship means groups of university-educated middle class people supporting each other on social media.
It has been an enormous shift. Both identity politics and social media have acted as great amplifiers for people who want to create fights, identity being the justification, social media the tool. It’s reached the stage that I fear we need to construct a new ideology altogether because we don’t have one that can deal with this.
Certainly it has devastated Scottish politics. For example, there are two potential leaders in the SNP who seem to me to have the intellectual capability we need, Kate Forbes and Joanna Cherry. Their intellect has nothing to do with their views, they’re just brighter and more capable than their peers. The gender debate isn’t a make-or-break anything for me – I could comfortably vote for someone with views from either side of that divide so long as they were serious about poverty, climate change and all the other big issues.
But by chance the two most capable are gender critical, so there is a constant campaign against them, cutting off paths of possible succession that offer any promise. And I just want to scream and say ‘OK, the other side, could you meet half way by putting forward a single credible candidate with any intellectual heft?’.
That is my final point. We desperately need some intellect in parliament because over the last decade one of the most notable trends is what feels like a two-way process, with levels of talent draining from our elected bodies and power flowing instead to our unelected bodies.
In the parliament we are reaching ‘researcher of former researcher for politician who became politician who is also now trying to become a politician’ territory. It is like there is a pool of three or four hundred professional people in politics and they have closed the route to the career ladder. Being ‘there’ beats being any good. Talent is scarce.
So we end up with a parliament that doesn’t work very well and in the absence of a strong parliamentary vision we have quangos stripping the decision-making from the whole democratic culture and hoarding it themselves. We’re de-democratising Scotland by weakening politics and strengthening technocrats. And it’s going very badly wrong. The technocrats don’t seem very, well, technically capable.
When I started the Jimmy Reid Foundation in 2010 the biggest barrier to getting anything done was political caution, and that will always be true. The second biggest barrier then was people saying ‘you can’t do that, it’s against EU rules’. Scotland’s officials used to take a really extreme interpretation of EU rules to prevent change.
You don’t hear that any more, but definitely not because we changed the rules after Brexit. Basically the more efficient way to block change has become to hive off the decision-making which would lead to change into these quangos and aleos and agencies. And so where ‘that is against EU rules’ was code for ‘there is no chance we’re getting involved’, the new code is ‘that is an operational matter for QUANGO NAME’.
When you stir the constitutional debate into this mix, you get an awful lot of political turbulence. In a strange way it isn’t the politics which has changed, it’s the field on which the politics is being played. And it is making it harder and harder to see how we pull everything back together again in time for whatever deadline you’ve got in your head for whatever thing you believe in, from independence, to your retirement, to net zero. Things will change, but it’s hard to see when and how.
And as for the list of thematic things that got better – well, I couldn’t really think of one. That’s the truth. I am increasingly getting the feeling like the last ten years are going to turn out to have been a complete catastrophe for humanity. I am really hoping that we’re talking 1935-1945, to be followed by 1955-1965. Because if this is 1925-1935 and we’ve got 1925-1945 ahead of us…