Nest of Fearties
For the second episode of Nest of Fearties – Skotia’s new Scottish election podcast – Coll McCail is joined by Ellie Gomersall and Niall Christie to discuss the Scottish Green Party, their time in government and their prospects ahead of next year’s election. This podcast is available to watch exclusively to Skotia’s Patreon subscribers.
Listen on Spotify HERE.
Ellie Gomersall is a columnist with The National and the Glasgow Greens’ Campaign Manager. Niall Christie edits the Green Left Scotland substack and ran for the party in Glasgow South last July. Subscribe to Green Left Scotland: https://greenleftscotland.substack.com
The practical Left might insist on mandated, recallable delegates to express the will of the collective, rather than an elite of representatives. All this podcast really suggests is the inevitable failure of our electoral politics to deliver for a mass movement. Especially in context of secret state involvement, Spycops etc, before even considering malign corporate influence.
Careerism is corrupting enough. Scottish Green perma-leaders Slater and Harvie said the quiet thing out loud when they revealed the importance of their own political careers in the ashtermath of the Bute House Agreement.
Elsewhere, Greens circling power have gone rightwards, especially in the NATO sphere. Politicians can so easily be nobbled, parties infiltrated by state/foreign power/corporations or captured by narrow interest groups, we don’t even need a theory of political drift to explain what we see. If most politicians have something to hide, these secrets will be known by unscrupulous groups with access to high-tech surveillance and blackmail applied.
Anyway, it would not be surprising if being tangled up in the machinery of party politics just ground down the majority of activists, distracted them from policy ideas and drained energy.
We don’t have time for gradualism in our polycrisis, nor use for equivocators in this War on Nature. Greenwashers aid ecociders. If it takes at least a generation to become politically savvy, democracy will be outmanouvred again and again. We need a whole new kind of political system, that shifts representation to the interests of the nonhuman living planet, which is not being served by playing by the current rules. Unfortunately, it looks like it will take disasters and state failure to shift the political centre of mass here. Will social class continue to matter in a lifeboat?
Sadly, this podcast seemed entirely devoted to humanist concerns, which perhaps is a useful gauge of where we are and where the problems lie.