2024, the Year that Wasn’t

The first in a mini-series looking at where we are at the end of a tumultuous year of change, stasis and breakdown.

As a year of turmoil carnage and absurdity grinds to a close, things may seem less clear than ever. The situation in Damascus, Paris, and Seoul (and elsewhere) is, despite a flurry of hot-takes, chaotic. But let’s not pretend this is new. Way back in 2011 Paul Mason wrote “Why its all Kicking Off Everywhere” describing a world facing a wave of uprisings, protests and revolutions: “Arab dictators swept away, public spaces occupied, slum-dwellers in revolt, cyberspace buzzing with utopian dreams. Events we were told were consigned to history—democratic revolt and social revolution—are being lived by millions of people.”

So what we are living through isn’t new, its the continuity and intensification of a process that’s been going on for a quarter of a century. But if anything the timeline is darker now, the Arab Spring and Occupy movement have come and gone, the independence movement was defeated, and since 2011 we have seen Trump ascend to office (twice), the fiasco of Brexit and the climate crisis intensify and deteriorate. As for “cyberspace buzzing with utopian dreams”, we are now faced with the Broligarchy and the Xodus.

So little is predictable in a world facing system collapse on multiple levels simultaneously that a degree of humility is required. Sometimes nothing makes sense, sometimes you don’t know what’s going on.

Closer to home things are not going as planned either.

2024 was supposed to be the year everything went back to normal. A generation of well remunerated columnists and gatekeepers informed us for months and months the following was about to happen: Labour would regain office and begin to deliver a change agenda of social and constitutional reform; this would both lead, and be propelled by Scottish Labour’s advance; this twin phenomenon would lead to the collapse of the SNP and the defeat of the independence movement. The mood in the camp was smug, confident and self-assured. The political task was reduced to the bromide of ‘get rid of the Tories’. Everything else would be fine. The deja vu was overwhelming.

The narrative behind this confident messaging was of a country ‘returned to normal’. The faithful Unionist scribes and commentators who produced these messages (I think we’re all familiar with who they are) have been less vocal as the Starmer honeymoon has turned sour and all the indications are that the long-awaited return of Labour is, in fact, a political, and electoral disaster. The ‘great re-set’ that the orphaned centrists both longed for, and presumed, isn’t happening.

Instead, a new poll from Norstat for the Sunday Times suggested a Scottish parliament set projection of 59 seats for the SNP:

More significantly, backing for independence has also risen to 54 per cent, the highest level for more than four years.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.

The analysis from the Sunday Times, who commissioned the polling and so were reluctantly obliged to publish it, suggests that the surge in support for the SNP was the result of a popular budget, with the backing of winter fuel payments, a commitment to eradicate the two-child benefit clause, as well as investment in housing and the NHS proving popular. Allied to this was the political collapse of the credibility of Anas Sarwar, as his (bizarre) position as the ‘defender of Scottish interests against Keir Starmer’ was exposed as a nonsense. Scottish Labour are hopelessly compromised by their own party and their own colleagues.

“The finger of blame for Labour’s predicament,” the poll-gurus John Curtice said, “points to 10 Downing Street.” He added: “Far from easing Anas Sarwar’s path to Bute House, Labour’s victory in July has seemingly made his task harder.”

There’s two question spring from this situation: How has this happened? and Does it matter?

So how did this happen?

I think that the unremarkable story from the Scottish Budget is one that has been crying out for the SNP for a long time. We are in an ongoing cost of living crisis, in which people are suffering growing poverty, inequality and destitution. Every indicator shows people in crisis, people who can’t afford to live in this society. Do the basics well. Respond to what’s before you.

That they are benefitting from a (basic) programme of modest social reform which contrasts strongly with Westminster’s continuity economics and politics is unsurprising. It all does beg the question, what would the electoral benefits of actual, more substantive political bravery and radicalism? Of course this is all predictive, the SNP actually have to now deliver some of the promises they have made, and so this may collapse. But they have the basis, a platform to try and reconstruct their battered political credibility.

The Unionist political parties are completely divided, cut in two by the emergence of Farage’s Reform Party, a ghost at the banquet that has no real base in Scotland and remains a media-entity sustained by its leaders ever-presence on our pan-UK broadcast media and by the obsession with immigration of our tabloid press. This is not to minimise the threat Reform pose.

Thirdly, despite the great efforts of our phalanx of redoubtable journalists, the Labour party’s rise to power has been a crushing disappointment. This is not a surprise. They told us before they were elected that weren’t going to do anything. It is a feature not a glitch. This is, as Joe Guinan wrote, brutally but accurately, Blairism Re-Heated:

“One of the consequences of having an ideology beached by history is that the dominant register of centrists has gone from the ebullient future-claiming hubris of the Third Way at its height to the nastiness, victimhood, and self-pity of the Labour Right today.

It may be satisfying to them from a factional point of view, but a recipe for government it is not. Warmed-over technocratic centrism is no match for the challenges of our times, in which economic and climate crises are interacting with the Covid pandemic and the rise of a neo-populist right to create an ‘Age of Anger’ in which perceived apologists for the status quo are given short shrift by electorates. The best that the Starmerites can hope for is to once again secure the position of the Labour Party as a rampart of the British state, made safe for the interests of capital and the ruling class – and therefore back in business as a revolving door into well-remunerated jobs in lobbying, the privatised industries, and the nonprofit-industrial complex.”

In this sense, Starmer & Co have successfully aligned themselves with ‘the country’ (England) in an entirely backward-looking project. They have proved themselves electable (once) but they have given ground and ceded politics to the right and the far-right in doing so. They have not – just as the Democrats in the US failed to do – provided a credible vision or a possible alternative to the politics of the right or of populist English nationalism. Instead they will be consumed by it.

This is why Labour is collapsing in Scotland.

But does it matter?

Many of you will be tired and bored of the SNP as the vehicle for political change. Haven’t we all been here before? What possible difference does 54% make if we don’t have a route map to independence?

These are good questions and while the SNP may be performing with some more competence and focus, it is another thing to imagine Swinney and Forbes creating enough momentum for real political change rather than managed social reform.

However, maybe its not up to them. The projection upwards onto political parties for leadership is not a winning formula. The 54% figure is remarkable, given the SNP’s own track record in office, given the failure of political leadership, given the (forever) ongoing police inquiry and given the surround-sound of hostility that pours out of the press every day. This has a deadening effect on the whole country.

If we are at 54% now, can you imagine where we’d be if we had had better leadership, more inspiring vision, and more radical ideas and policies? Can you imagine where we’d be if we had more control over our own media and the story we tell and are told?

Building a majority for independence can only exert pressure and momentum. This will need insurgency and imagination and the creation of alternative parallel structures for the emergent Scotland. Labour, far from being the saviour of the Union as so widely predicted, may in fact be its undertaker. Keir Starmer had an opportunity to show that there was an alternative within the Union for progressive change and reform. There isn’t.