TEN YEARS AFTER: From The Province Of The Cat
Like Blair in 1997 Starmer peddles the myth of a financial “black hole” in the “nations budget” and like Blair he blames the previous Tory government for the cuts he “needs” to make. Blair introduced student tuition fees and if Labour win in Scotland in 2026 Anas Sarwar will gladly introduce them into Scotland, as his party hates that the SNP removed them. “We are not a something for nothing country!” as he has reminded us on many occasions. Despite (or because of) being privately educated at the independent Hutchesons’ Grammar School and having studied general dentistry at the University of Glasgow Anas Sarwar is a political technocrat from top to toe. Anas knows best. He will pull all the social gains the SNP government have given to the Scottish people like so many teeth. “We are not a something for nothing country!” Have you ever met a poor dentist?
Which raises the question – just what kind of country are we? Constitutionally the last ten years have been a decade of nothing. From being the optimistic seed planters of a glorious revolution in 2014, in 2024 the independence bandwagon lies mired in the heavy gravel by the side of the road called Process. This is what happens when technocrats are in charge. We started off in 2014 with independence for Scotland generated from below, encapsulated in the single word-slogan “Yes!”. Shortly after the No vote and the rapid rise of the SNP as a political party this became independence from above. Instead of finding a way to forge a relationship with the rest of the world Scotland was subjected to “continuity”, which is the beloved term of the technocrat. Instead of independence and self-rule this “continuity” has given us extended devolution, which is a machine that is broken and was designed to be. It is this machine which wallows in the mire beside the road of Process.
Instead of having an independence strategy that was fresh with spontaneity and youthful movement to put pressure on the status quo, the energy of “Yes!” was dragged into the dead end of “official channels” by the political technocrats who love process and the road to nowhere. On the ground in 2014 the general political and economic philosophy was socialist in its poetry and social democratic in its prose. What the technocrats have given us is a neo-liberal literature of grift and grind, with pseudo-meritocracy tacked on for show. In 2014 money talked, it is true. In 2024 money swears. In 2014 Scotland had a semblance of an industrial and manufacturing capacity. In 2024 the technocrats have hollowed all of that out.
The Brexit vote in 2016 was a golden opportunity for the technocrats to enhance their asset stripping strategy and their crusade against universalism – witness the introduction of means testing as to who or who does not receive the measly Winter Fuel Allowance. As was the Covid pandemic. The Scotland Act of 1998 has been used by Westminster as a constitution manque in order to conserve devolution and to thwart independence. The Scotland Act of 2016 devolved many more responsibilities to Holyrood but without the budget to carry them out, which allows the Unionists to cry “mismanagement” and “incompetence” without a shred of irony considering the HS2 railway disaster and the massive corruption in equipment orders during Covid. The Internal Market Act is designed to keep Scotland in her box and the use of Section 35 orders and the Supreme Court in London reminds us just who is the Boss. All this means is that over the past ten years the right to self-determination has been denied.
Technocrats tell us what democracy is or is not when it suits them. They will “protect democracy” by eroding it. They will design a Freedom of Information Bill, for example, which makes it even harder to source information. It is bad for democracy, the technocrats will say, that the milkman can know what the Prime Minister is up to.
In 2014 the SNP were on the rise. In 2024 they are in decline. Why? Because on independence they have given us ten years of nothing. Their hubris could well signal their demise completely. For Scotland this would be a tragedy. On the evidence of what they have said and done since the July 4th election blood bath it is apparent that the SNP have learned nothing, that they do not accept their decline is their fault and the result of their policies, most especially their non-action on independence. If they carry on doing the same thing and expect different results then the Scottish people will reject that madness. The “Yes!” movement may have mired on the side of the road called Process but now it is slowly being turned into a corporate badge rather than a proudly shouted slogan of freedom. “Yes!” is being de-activated, logo-ised and de-politicised.
It could be said that in 2024 Scotland has become a-political. This suits the technocrats who run our political parties as the political structure of Ukania steers all political energy away from the dangerous ground of a written constitution which embodies the Sovereignty Of The People. As a result Ukania – and Scotland within it – is becoming insular and the further you travel out from the centre – London/Edinburgh – to the periphery, this insularity increases.
This is not because the people do not desire to participate in the decisions which affect their lives but increasingly they are not consulted, are ignored and as a result become alienated and politics and possibility drown in the bog of indifference. Great swathes of the Highlands and Islands, for example, are represented in Westminster by Liberal Democrats, who are the party of the technocrats dream. This is not an abstraction. Having Jamie Stone as your MP means that you live, not in an a-political zone, but a non-political zone. This is the entitled and arid politics of the Royal Family at the Castle of Mey, the Halkirk Games with its kitsch corporate clans, the Black Isle Show with its big-agro tractors, Remembrance Day, The Armed Force and Dounreay that can do no wrong even when it does, all the time.
For each and all of these, so the technocratic line runs, we should be eternally grateful. Meanwhile our landscape gets trashed, our energy costs increase even though we export vast amounts of electricity from renewable sources, the housing stock is bought up at inflated prices, the population ages and the young leave. It is on the periphery where privilege is promoted over utility, where the universalism of benefit only applies if you own over 20k acres and where the majority are means tested to their grave.
How deep into decline must Ukania dive before she hits the procrustean bedrock of wretchedness? The technocrats of Ukania will manage this decline as though they have had no hand in it, as if somehow it spontaneously appeared. He reality is that it is government policies which create and sustain economic, social and cultural decline, not the wee folk who live beneath the hill. In the ten years since 2014 unregulated rentier capitalism has corrupted out native instincts and stripped us of any power we thought we had. In the north tourism has been hollowed out by the NC500 as well as by malfunctioning government. The drift over the last decade has been from active politics to anti-democratic pessimism, especially in the young. They have concluded that there is nothing in it for them. Passivity is the creed of the technocrat.
Hard political reality is that you either control or you are controlled. That this situation is intolerable and cannot be allowed to continue goes without saying, even though many are saying it and many are ignoring it. To look at Scotland now is to see that we are being robbed – asset stripped. Everything is being sold, shut down or funnelled South to make money for others. Our oil, and gas has been looted, our land owned by a handful of people and trusts which are headquartered firth of Scotland. The BBC narrative is that whatever the SNP government does is wrong. The SNP line is that whatever the Westminster government does to Scotland is wrong. This is the classic instance of two wrongs not making a right.
Ten years on from the referendum of 2014 what we need to manufacture is some courage and optimism. We need to reassert our Claim Of Right. As William Blake reminds us,
“He who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing mortal eye can see, does not imagine at all.”
So we have to move beyond the technocrats and imagine our nation into being. We can also imagine that once Operation Branchform is concluded by Police Scotland and a report submitted to the Procurator Fiscal, if that is the way it is to go, then we, the Scottish people, should demand an enquiry into the justification of spending more than £1.3 million on it and into the activities of the Special Branch and MI5 in Scottish political life since before 2014 to the present day. The Technocrats will scream. But we must know all the reasons why the last decade, constitutionally, has been ten years of nothing.
©George Gunn 2024
It was Cameron and Clegg who gave us student fees. A fine article with much that is entirely accurate.
Jim – student tuition fees were introduced by Labour government- Act was passed in 1998. Clegg promised to scrap in 2010 manifesto but backed down after entering coalition and paid price at 2015 GE for this.
I believe Tuition Fees were introduced in some form by Labour/Lib Dem coalition but scrapped when SNP came to power.
True but the real sea change came with the coalition that got rid of all government contribution, essentially privatising HE creating a false market and a disastrous model. This was a world away from the 50/50 arrangement under Labour that created a joint contribution between student and state. SNP did scrap them (good) but still rely on the full fees of English students, hence actively encouraging universities to recruit English students. It would be interesting to see what the finances of such universities would be without those English fees (and indeed internatioanls students who pay a lot more).
The Lab/Lib coalition scrapped university tuition fees in Scotland. The SNP scrapped the graduate endowment scheme (and a lot of bursaries). Both of them instigated a whole raft of dubious ‘universities’ that give their graduates pretty dubious bits of paper. Other interesting news: the hugely hyped Scottish child payment scheme is exactly the same as child benefit in England and Wales (same payments, same criteria). Westminster increased the maximum payment to £26.? last year, so the Scottish government had to do the same as the Tories. I actually bought the boosterism and thought the SCP was somehow groundbreaking, then I looked it up when I was bored.
I think that in Scotland you can get both Child Benefit and the Scottish Child Payment.
Niemand – how have Universities income been affected by Brexit?
Pretty bad though it depends. Before Brexit, EU students could come and study under the same rules as home students. In Scotland this meant there were no fees (though English students always paid the fees as per the regime in England, a strange anomaly). In England they paid the same fees and got the same loans as home students. I know in England Brexit has meant a huge decline of EU students and thus income but the picture is more complex in Scotland as they did not pay fees anyway (and so cost the taxpayer) but as they are now all ‘international’ students and thus subject to significant fees (and no loans), the numbers have also dried up. The push to recruit more international students across the UK to try and make up shortfalls (frozen fees in England or government funding in Scotland) is major but now also thwarted by migration rules.
Behind the scenes there may be other EU based income streams that have changed / gone post-Brexit, but I have little knowledge of that.
Though things do look better for students in terms of the Scottish funding model, once you dig a bit deeper, the funding models across the UK an failing badly to the point there is talk of collapse and staff redundancies have been happening at a pace across the UK.
they were at the students afore cameron & clegg hud thir wee luv in, am trying tae mind that far back, ah think it wis around 1992/93 when they began cutting maintenance grants (at least up here) & making students find the 10 then 20 then 30 percent of their maintenance from the magic money tree
As far as I remember it, a great deal of the 2014 independence campaign was about how rich we would all suddenly become (check-out my the size of my carrot). Note that to the majority of Scots (who voted for Scotland to remain part of the UK), this navel-gazing means fuck-all. As far as I can see, and as illustrated by this article, what now calls itself the independence movement is reduced to shouting at itself.
Perhaps you remember wrongly. I do not remember being told that I personally would be richer in the event of independence. Indeed, it was something that never, ever entered my mind when I considered whether Scotland should be an independent country.
The author’s only answer to the current constipation in his article is some aristocrats’ anti-Catholic screed in favour of King Billy overthrowing the British monarch, from the late 18th century (mission acomplished). And he actually sounds consitutionally serious about it. And that’s it.
George Gunn tells us that Alex Salmond was not a technocrat. Was Nicola Sturgeon ? It cannot be doubted that, for most of the decade since the Referendum, Nicola Sturgeon was – by a long way – the most popular politician in Scotland. The election results prove that. (Astonishingly, his article about the last ten years does not mention her at all.)
He is wrong to cite the cut in Winter Fuel Allowance as part of a ‘crusade against universalism’. The WFA is not universal. It is paid only to pensioners. Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies recently described pensioners as ‘easily the wealthiest section of society.’
Well this pensioner ain’t wealthy. I’m on on about 12 grand per annum. I don’t qualify for Pension Credit and thus will be refused WFA. Thanks Rachel. By the way, I see Scottish Labour’s support has gone down by 11% in the latest Optimum opinion poll. Nice one, Rachel !
I spent my entire career as a technocrat. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with being a technocrat. Techocrats can be useful to society when their skills are employed in the implementation of progressive public policies. George appears to be using the word ‘techocrat’ as a pejorative term for machine politicians with no discernible social, cultural or environmental purpose beyond their personal advancement. That is not what the term means.