Stop the World We Need to Get Off

Scotland is the nation that invented everything, except itself. Now we are at an Interregnum, an idea from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks in which ‘[t]he crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.

In Scotland, this means a period of tittle-tattle and gossip over Salmond and Sturgeon’s disputed legacy that leads us nowhere other than bitter rancour, which will not, and cannot be resolved. In place of strategy, we have anecdote; in place of meaningful dialogue or unity, we have personal animus and tribalism. The answer is not going to come from the Old Guard slugging it out, but an entirely new guard listening and strategising and outlining an entirely new prospectus.

In England, the Interregnum means a period of watching as a new populist Left emerges from the shambles of the Starmer regime, or the country decays into Farage’s Fever Dream.

Some of the coverage of the end of the old regimes is hilarious. Alex Massie, apparently seriously, suggests that Sturgeon was sustained by something called the ‘London Left’ [ London’s left indulged the Nicola Sturgeon fantasy], surely a phantom of the Unionist Right that doesn’t bear much examination. In a massive statement of the obvious, in the Guardian, Martin Kettle writes: ” The most important thing about Sturgeon’s political career is not whether she was relatable, good on television or better than the men. Pretty obviously, she was all three. It is whether she was right to be a nationalist. In my book, she was wrong. From her teenage years, Sturgeon’s overriding political goal has been to break up the United Kingdom. It still is.”

Who knew?

Across the pages, Iain MacWhirter takes the opposite view from Kettle, arguing that: “The Tragedy of Nicola Sturgeon: she was never a Scottish Nationalist.”

Too much? Not enough? It depends on where on the incredibly narrow political spectrum your white male columnists decide.

None of this feeding-frenzy matters.

Getting On and Off

The world has moved on, since Winnie Ewing uttered the immortal words ‘Stop the world, Scotland wants to get on’ in 1967. Now, it’s increasingly obvious that – in 2025 and beyond – Scotland needs to ‘get off’ the world that is predicated on endless growth, extractivism, fossil fuel economics and a commitment to the moral depravity that is support for, and involvement in genocide. All of this requires a complete break from the British state and a complete break from the disastrous economic orthodoxies that have led us into poverty, grotesque social inequality and a mindset which is rapidly destroying the ecological system on which, ultimately, we all depend.

At some level, almost everyone knows this.

‘Independence is Normal’ goes the slogan, and so it is. But so too is the routine abuse of power that comes with states of every size. Actually imagining and enacting something genuinely different is clearly the task at hand. This is way beyond a theatre of personality politics and tribes as we are currently seeing played out, and also way beyond the idea of ‘course correction’ or new strategems. It may even be beyond the idea that party politics or mainstream politics delivers change, there is no real evidence to support this claim, even if it is the operating system in which most discourse takes place.

Our colleagues in Believe in Scotland have posted on the fact that Independence support jumps 5% if you tell people an independent Scotland will be a republic: “People want radical change not ‘an everything will be the same indy Scotland’. They think it’s not worth the risk if nothing much is going to change!”

So, let’s do it. The first plank of a completely new plan for independence must be for a Scottish Republic. It’s 2025. Just as the disruptors of Farage or Sultana slug it out amid a failing system, so too in Scotland we need a new politics. The old dictum (from Blair and beyond) that you ‘only win from the centre’ is so obviously redundant to everyone apart from the commentariat that cling to old shibboleths and trundle out the same tired old prose. The Centrist political project has collapsed, and this has consequences for Scotland.

As Jonathan Shafi wrote a few weeks ago [No referendum is coming. Let’s drop the ‘Yes’ and refocus]: “There is no door-knocking to be done, and no community outreach to be had. Instead, this has to be a period of ideas. It is not impossible to make the independence question the gravitational pole for the most interesting and dynamic political thinking available. This involves opening big debates about Scotland’s role in the world, and about its economic future. We should be producing more theorists, writers and speakers building on the best radical traditions we have.”

I suspect that Jonathon and I might not agree on what these might be, but I have to agree with his analysis that: “For this to happen, we would need to escape the bandwidth as proscribed by the [SNP] on the one hand, and the main Westminster parties on the other to rebuild and rethink the foundations and principles of the project as a whole. To make them fit for the world as it is today … At present, it does not exist in any meaningful or political form. And here, you cannot avoid politics. The British state is becoming more authoritarian, so the response has to be to uphold civil liberties. Privatisation has failed, so the response has to be rooted in bringing our resources into democratic control. The UK Government has been arming a genocide, so the response must be to advocate for an entirely new foreign policy based on peace and justice. Only once the base achieves ideological coherence can there be a serious campaign which aims to reach out to wider sections of society.”

He’s not wrong, and this is not just the failure of a handful of personalities or a generation of political leaders. They did what they could from the world they had inherited. They failed, not out of treachery or incompetence but because they were (and are) trapped in a political system which doesn’t work anymore. As the late, great Ursula Le Guin had it: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

The Union seems inescapable and a hundred scribes and more have careers dedicated to telling you this is so, even when they themselves can’t believe it.

Britain has changed, it has been transformed since the Blair era. The descent of British political values – and a salient reason to exit this Union as fast as possible – comes with the anniversary of Robin Cook’s passing. He came from an era when Scots politicians could have serious heavyweight influence at Cabinet level, and when serious ideas, such as floating the notion of an ‘ethical Foreign Policy’ could be taken seriously.

To be fair, they weren’t taken too seriously, were they? His resignation in March 2003 – twenty-two years ago marks a passing of time but is also a useful barometer of political change.  Cook’s resignation from his positions as Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons on March 17, 2003, in protest against the invasion of Iraq is unthinkable today, in era when Labour proscribe Palestine Action and arrest grannies en masse and roll-out facial recognition tech.

There will not be another Robin Cook in British history, and this is a low bar. We are where we are but it’s a long way from where we were.

Back to the Future

The task ahead of us not just to re-orient ourselves around this reality, or recover from the myths and tragedies of neoliberalism, but to cast aside the gaslighting of the British State and media that there are any circumstances in which it is okay to be embroiled in genocide, or in which siding with a quasi-fascist like Donald Trump could be excused under the pretence of ‘pragmatism’.

Back to Shafi’s idea that we should “be producing more theorists, writers and speakers building on the best radical traditions we have.” By definition, I don’t know what the future theorists, writers and speakers’ will be – though I do know they will be future-focused and as far from the current clutch as can be imagined.

But what are the best radical traditions we might draw on? To ‘escape the bandwidth’ we might look to figures as diverse and iconoclastic as Jimmy Reid, Nan Shepherd, RD Laing, AS Neill, Mary Barbour, John Maclean, James Connolly, Elsie Inglis, John McGrath, or Geoff Shaw – or a thousand other under-recognised figures. We would need to look beyond them as individuals as beacons of clarity or insight, and see what movements they represented and came out of. Reassessing and establishing and archiving our own past would provide a rich seam to mine for, paradoxically, new ideas on social housing, land ownership, healthcare, political organisation, mental health, or our relationship with nature.

This might, or might not, seem a laudable platform to transcend the current impasse. You might rule it out in favour of ‘one last heave’ or some other wild strategem – ‘Go to the UN!’ springs to mind. However, stay with me, if you can.

There’s another element that is going to make this difficult, and that is the calling of romance and melancholy that particularly affects the Left, and, regularly afflicts the Scots. We are enthralled to grandiose romantic failure and we are addicted to it. We are enthralled to both a Left and a Scottish melancholia. The Scots version: the King Across the Water, we might be familiar with, from BPC, to John Smith, to Kate Forbes to Alex Salmond, is familiar to us all. It serves the purpose of succumbing to a state of perpetual regret. It is a romantic melancholy that allows us to dwell in the past and in victimhood.

JK Gibson Graham (a pen name shared by feminist economic geographers Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson) writes of the Left equivalent:

“… in which attachment to a past political analysis or identity is stronger than the interest in present possibilities for mobilisation, alliance or transformation…”

“Rather than grieving and letting go, the melancholic subject identifies with lost ideals, experiencing their absence as feelings of desolation and ejection…’We come to love our left passions and reasons, our left analyses and convictions, more than we love the existing world that we presumably seek to alter’.

So as well as moving beyond a narrow band-width of political, economic and cultural thinking, we also need to transcend the tradition of melancholic victimhood and reminiscence of what ‘might have been’. It’s disabling and disempowering.

With this task in mind, the publication of Nicola Sturgeon’s memoirs could act as a bookend to an era. We might divide recent Scottish history into phases that run from the post-war era 1945-1967, dominated by both British hegemony and cultural upheaval; the 1967-1997 period with the rise of Scottish nationalism alongside Thatcherism ultimately led to Devolution; and the 1997-2026 era in which Blairism and then Tory rule culminated in both the referendums for Scottish independence and Brexit.

We are now in a period beyond that, a period dominated by Gramsci’s ‘morbid symptoms’ in which everything seems moribund and stuck. However painful, this period is unlikely to last forever. The crisis of British Labour has deep (and largely unacknowledged) consequences for the Union – and if we can go beyond the matters of personality politics and re-build a movement for change, we can climb out of the present morass and move towards a brighter future.

Illustration: Daniel Seex