Scotland and the Hauntology of Post-Brexit Britain

The last few weeks have been pretty depressing living on the outskirts of Anglo-Britain’s wreckage. If Britain has been a memefest of indulgence in hyper-nostalgia for the last decade, the new version of Spitfire Nationalism allows you to hurtle even further back. If Brexit was chock full of World War Two references now we can experience the hauntology of rationing as the already precarious food system keels over. Hauntology – nostalgia for a past you’ve never experienced – and a nostalgia for a future that doesn’t exist anymore – is the cultural experience we’re living through, and there’s no accident that the war is evoked again and again. Scattered among the poppies and the royals and the endless remembrance is a recurring meme carefully cultivated by the Leave leadership, that of conflating Brexit – and specifically No Deal Brexit – with “our finest hour”.

Now we are told the BBC is to suspend the licence fee as part of a one-off dispensation for the king’s coronation weekend. The move will allow pubs to screen the live coronation ceremony coverage on 6 May and the coronation concert on 7 May without needing to buy a TV licence. As Dr Charlotte Proudman the Director of Right to Equality writes: “3.9 million children and 9.6 million adults live in poverty in the UK. Meanwhile, Charles’ coronation is expected to cost around £100,00,000. That’s £33,333,333 per day over 3 days for 1 man — our unelected head of state — to have a crown put on his head. Make it make sense.”

Booze and bunting, it’s a proven winner. This orgy of stupidity just rolls on through melancholy delirium punctured only by the joy of watching Britain disintegrate. As ‘the nation’ gets organised for a coronation, the latest dethroning is also being celebrated.

The desultory surround-sound of the unionist commentariat (‘The Independence Dream is Over‘ Iain Macwhirter; ‘What did Nicola Sturgeon ever do for us? She failed‘ Alex Massie …and on…) has declared the independence  movement over and celebrated the death of the cause. Like monkeys typing on keyboards inevitably the results would somehow land good eventually, and having written Nicola Sturgeon’s epitaph religiously (and exclusively) for years the scribes were finally awarded with the scalp they had long sought.

But if the shrill sound of glee is deafening, the various victorious editors and gatekeepers have little really to celebrate. Yes they have succeeded in backing the British government in suppressing a democratic vote; Yes they have succeeded in undermining the cause of Scottish democracy with a relentless banshee-like oppositionalism; and Yes the party that had 76% support in elections to Westminster in 2019 has run aground as much as its leader has been run to ground. But this is a hollow victory: the political projects they support as alternatives, whether its a rose-tinted Federalism of a Never Land or the sharp boot of the Conservatives lie as unlikely to see electoral support in Scotland as ever. They have won nothing. They are a negation. Where Union once promised stability and diversity it now brings poverty and the Patriotic Alternative in Skegness. 

As Adam Ramsay has written: “Much of the coverage of Sturgeon’s resignation seems to have been based on the assumption that she and Salmond cast some kind of magic spell over the people of Scotland, and that her departure is a disaster for the independence movement. But, while she certainly is an impressive politician and it’s hard to see her departure as anything other than bad for the SNP, the primary force driving support for independence is revulsion at the British state. And that feeling isn’t likely to go away.”

The Limits of Devolution

The failure of muscular unionism, other than as an instrumental device to suppress the vote is clear, Nothing has been won. This is a Zombie Unionism with an uncertain future. What is the endgame? With the Yes movement the goal is clear, or at least it was. We want a functioning democracy with as much independence as modern states can deliver. With the No movement what do they want? It’s not entirely clear. They want the status quo, seemingly at all costs and with no threshold. There is no lurch to the right, no breaking of law, no act of political violence that will prevent them clinging tighter to the wreckage and saying ‘this is fine”.

Now, among the frenzied celebration from the media class, the question emerges, what more do they want? It’s clear that Kate Forbes – if she is victorious – won’t challenge Westminster over the use of the S35. It’s an anomaly of the anti-trans reform lobby that while they masquerade as being the most fervent and agitated supporters of independence – they offer up a sort of quietism to Westminster if its convenient to quash legislation passed by overwhelming majority in Holyrood they don’t like.

S35’s were once a marginal anomaly, now they are becoming normal and cheered on by those of (supposed) left and right to attack their enemies within the Yes movement and the SNP. There is now an unholy alliance between those forces whose entire outlook is to destroy the SNP leadership from within the party, and those Unionists who have always had this aim. Neither have a credible alternative. This is not to say that the SNP leadership has not brought much of this debacle into being, they clearly have.

Now we are faced with the bleak reality that – as George Gunn points out – devolution is a powerless option, and, incredibly, becoming less powerful. We’re now left with the bizarre question: is devolution something we should defend? The idea seemed ridiculous even a few years ago. Now it looks like the Unionist strategy is not just to defeat any possibility of independence but to destroy devolution too.

If the purpose of devolution was to cement the British state it has failed and now must be destroyed. As Scott Hames has written: “Devolution is a creature of high politics, where it names a conservative, state-nationalist strategy for re-cementing UK sovereignty on terms acceptable to public opinion in Scotland and Wales. It is a managerial sort of twentieth-century nationalism, of and for the state-nation, intended to strengthen the social, emotional and political anchorage of the UK’s established governing arrangements (including the party duopoly). This is not a nationalism of pro-British folksong, but grey Whitehall officials plotting how to canalise ‘national feeling’ in Scotland and Wales, carrying it safely away from separatism.”

But devolution failed in that task and yet has also failed as a ‘stepping stone’ to independence.

Proxies and Patsies

So we come to the SNP elections for a new leader, a contest characterised by self-interest and hidden agendas, proxy-candidates and patsies. The party, for so long a paragon of unity and discipline has descended quickly into a pit of factions and sects that have overshadowed everything. If Brexit-Britain has us hurtling back to the 1970s with NF immigration polices and union-bashing, so too does Devo-Scotland with It’s Scotland Oil returning as if climate change was just a chimera and denouncing gay-marriage as if the 80s and 90s just didn’t happen at all.

Ash Regan – who allegedly worked for Commonweal – advocates abandoning the SNP’s (already inadequate) commitment to Net Zero saying she will not support an accelerated net zero path which “turns off the North Sea taps”. Regan is the proxy for the Cherry-Salmond-McAlpine wing of the movement. She now has said she believes Scotland will be allowed its independence “without a referendum” if enough voters support pro-independence parties in an election. Quite how this is more coherent than Sturgeon’s de facto referendum plan is unclear, its just better because its not Sturgeon. Thankfully the true believers have already started to claim that the vote is being rigged in case their preferred candidate fails. If all else fails a new conspiracy can be invented and will be devoured faithfully.

The enthusiasm for this position may be a tactical one motivated by the idea that Regan’s party (or parties) have potential support in the NE. But such a position is just incompatible with climate reality. As the UN and the IPCC have repeatedly stated: new fossil fuels are incompatible with a stable climate, and mean millions will face unliveable conditions, resulting in mass displacement and death.

Kate Forbes is the favoured candidate of the British tabloids and the small ‘c’ conservatives from within the party. Now it turns out she owes her political life to an internship sponsored by an anti-abortion Christian lobby group that doesn’t disclose its financial backers. The group, Christian Action, Research and Education (CARE), is known for its opposition to abortion, sex education and LGBTIQ+ rights. The revelations expose not just the social conservatism within the SNP but the fact that it is unlikely to survive this process intact.

There is no unifying candidate. Out of this process will come profound change and the possibility of two independence parties.

What is remarkable about some of the discourse is the idea that by allying with Alba there will be some benefit to the independence movement. This is a classic (and ongoing) case of confusing the audience. The challenge is not to persuade the Alba voters to support independence, they already do and represent a tiny splinter of the wider movement. Looking outwards to the wider electorate, rather than inwards to the movement is key.

As I have said before: “The single thing that is needed is for the SNP – and the independence movement – to show how creating a functioning democracy will improve social conditions for millions facing economic crisis on a scale they’ve never experienced before. This and only this will change things.”

The Failure of Politics

If, as Neil Mackay has suggested: “The SNP is unravelling, and with it any notion that the party is a truly progressive force in Scottish politics” there may be some upside to the present crisis. When the current blood-letting has ended there will need to be a major reconfiguration. It’s hard to see how some of the candidates and their supporters can co-exist within the same political project.

But if the debacle raises profound questions about the strategic failure of the SNP under its current leadership, it also raises profound questions about party politics. Maybe political parties don’t bring about real change? This then is a failure of politics not just a failure of devolution or the SNP. And for those waiting in the wings? The Liberal Democrats have all but disappeared from public life; the Tories will whine and wail but contribute precisely nothing positive to the body politic in Scotland; and Scottish Labour may benefit from the SNP disintegration – but Starmer’s re-heated Blairism is hardly catching fire. Starmer is benefitting from Not Being Jeremy Corbyn and from the abject failure of consecutive Conservative administrations. But their stance on Europe, their hangover from Better Together and their air of bedraggled negativity means they are unlikely to make significant electoral inroads.

But, as the saying goes: “it’s always darkest before the dawn”. Reject the miserabilism, embrace the cold dark reality of change and face the future. Independence is not about one individual or one party and the ideal of creating a fully-functioning democracy, a future-facing country ready to rebuild for the challenge of the 21 Century hasn’t just disappeared overnight. The relentless churn from the unionist media has been this: you don’t exist; you couldn’t afford to function; you don’t have language or culture (or economy); everything you do is a failure; and now, ‘independence is over’. Even as Britain faces the humiliation of rationing from the self-induced catastrophe of Brexit, the argument for the Union is weaker than ever. Out of the fallout of the collapse of the Sturgeon era must rise a movement renewed and re-made.