The Dearth

The renowned and widely-liked broadcaster Bernard Ponsonby retired this week in a hail of deserved appreciation. Ponsonby combined the qualities of warmth and humanity with a sharp edge of journalistic inquiry. He signed-off from STV with an assessment that Scottish politics now suffers from “a real dearth of thinkers”. He cited the former politicians “Donald Dewar, George Robertson, Bruce Millan, John Smith, Robin Cook, Gordon Brown”. He added: “On the SNP side, Alex Salmond, Gordon Wilson, a much under-rated thinker” before naming three “pugilistic” Tories from that era in “Malcolm Rifkind, George Younger, Michael Forsyth”.

Now at first it’s easy to denounce the current crop of politicians (of all parties) who appear to share a combination of shallow managerialism and a severe lack of what the broadcaster called a ‘hinterland’. But while this critique of today’s politicians may hold true, I’m not sure the warm hazy glow of nostalgia is as easy to sustain.

For a start the list is striking for being an exclusively white and male one. It’s as if women didn’t exist until, when, 2007? Later? Second of all none of those listed served in a Scottish parliament delivering Scottish policy solutions. Rifkind, Younger and Forsyth were Thatcher’s Toadies delivering the unpalatable ideology of Thatcherism to a country that had explicitly and wholesale rejected it at the ballot box. Their job was to oversee the destruction of Scottish industry, of mining communities and the imposition of the Poll Tax. They oversaw mass unemployment. As for a dearth of ideas, well they certainly had them, but they were utterly repugnant and their imposition was completely undemocratic.

Equally, Gordon Wilson might well have been an ‘under-rated thinker but who can remember a single one of his under-rated thoughts today? I can’t.

Less equally, but still, out of Donald Dewar, George Robertson, Bruce Millan, John Smith, Robin Cook, and Gordon Brown who can remember one of their Big Ideas? I mean Donald gets a pass for delivering devolution, no mean feat and deserving of his unscalable statue at the top of Buchanan Street. John Smith can be remembered as the ‘greatest PM we never had’ and as the man who delivered the Prawn Cocktail Offensive, an attempt to woo the city with Labour’s business-friendly vibes. Robin Cook can be remembered as the man who offered up the idea of an ‘ethical Foreign Policy’, an idea first lauded then quickly scrapped and buried under Brown and Blair’s Iraq War folly. Speaking of Brown, he would I suppose be remembered for this Red Paper for Scotland but is now more articulate about Multibanks than Socialism.

I would argue that Ponsonby’s reflections are deeply nostalgic and skewed by the fact that politics of any real worth or edge or value doesn’t really happen from politicians anymore, if it ever did. The thinkers of any worth in Scotland today are unlikely to be part of the clubabble scene where members of the Scottish media and political class used to intermingle and even inter-marry (as a famous early Sunday Herald map depicted).

Scottish thinkers today are also masked by the surround-sound of Opinion makers, columnists, gatekeepers and editors (almost all white men of a certain vintage) that dominate and police Scottish public life. These people drown-out any complexity or nuance, their views are uniform and rigid, and often orchestrated by the chumocracy that sustains them. Their networks are sustained by bonds of friendship, common schooling, or being colleagues in ‘think tanks’ hardly worthy of the name.

Scotland really doesn’t have a ‘dearth of thinkers’ it has a surplus of institutions and gatekeepers who over-dominate with the same bland, rigid and relentlessly negative view of Scotland & the last thing any of them want is *any* change at all. Their views on anything from recycling bottles to protecting the sea to hate crimes can be anticipated well in advance and appear as if choreographed day in day out ad nauseam. In this sense complaining about a ‘dearth of thinker’s’ is a sort of sad joke, its a form of intense nostalgia where Scotland’s media and political class can look backwards fondly to better days. Rejecting this mythology does not suggest support for today’s politicians but instead that the very idea of where ‘ideas’ come from and might flourish completely changes.