What Use are Political Parties?

WHAT USE ARE POLITICAL PARTIES? From The Province Of The Cat by George Gunn

At the recent SNP conference, John Swinney effectively committed his party to the dead end of Devolution. A strategy to achieve a majority of 65 (or more) MSPs at the next election to Holyrood is an abandonment of the idea of Scottish independence, no matter how often he claimed the opposite and no matter how keenly the conference delegates voted for his unrealistic motion. The oppositional amendment that the party should treat the forthcoming election as a plebiscite on independence and when and if the independence supporting parties accrue a majority that the First Minister uses that as a mandate, as proof of the Scottish people’s desire for independence, and begins negotiating for such with Westminster, and if Westminster refuses to engage to declare (somehow) that Scotland is independent. This strategy is also unrealistic.

The truth is, as it stands now, there is no legal way for Scotland to proclaim the sovereignty of the people and become an independent country. The political system prevents it. Democracy stops at Devolution. The political parties, by design and compliance, have arranged it so. This leaves the Scottish people dreadfully exposed. With England becoming an increasingly intolerant and xenophobic society, the need for Scotland to find her own way correspondingly becomes ever more urgent. With this urgency comes the sombre reality that all the political parties have failed Scotland. Which raises the question: what use are political parties?

The SNP have evolved into a bourgeois cabal of timid Human Resource managers. Alba started badly and since Alex Salmond died have got steadily worse. The Greens cannot decide what they are and in a time of environmental crisis have managed to make themselves unpopular. The Unionist parties remain what they always have been – agents of the British state in Scotland: every one of their MSP’s is Daniel Defoe.

The function of all the political parties in Scotland is to keep Scotland in her place in the Union, so that her assets can be stripped and her population contained at about five and a half million. Without independence, Scotland cannot protect its people who are increasingly exploited by the injustice of an emboldened financial elite with their class weapon of landlordism, which is wielded as a blunt instrument of power from Durness to Dumfries.

As the SNP conference decision on how to fight the 2026 election showed quite glaringly: we need another system of politics and we need it fast. A party that was founded on the principle of independence for Scotland, that repeatedly fails to deliver on that founding principle and which has grown comfortable with the limited powers of Devolution is of no use to the Scottish people. The SNP, as a political party, are playing games and the business of independence is more than that: it requires serious attention. The game they play is – the SNP in power, everybody else in metaphorical jail.

For the SNP, politics is a form of bourgeois totalitarianism: it leads nowhere. Without Truth and Justice we have nowhere to go politically. The Union of 1707 was founded on a lie. There was no new nation created. Scotland was subsumed into England and given a few seats in the English House of Commons and in the House of Lords. Nothing of any substantial good has come out of it, except for the period of necessary socialism which followed the carnage of World War Two. The ruling class was terrified of the working class then, and they are terrified of them still. Since 1945 the English majority has messianically gone about dismantling those achievements in social and economic welfare. Now everything and everyone is seen as a cash commodity, to be exploited, owned, rented, sold off and monetarised. According to the IMF, the UK may be the second fastest growing economy in the G7, albeit with the highest rate of inflation, but in reality, it is a rentier Ponzi-state and produces very little that benefits the majority. It is a system which rewards the wealthy elite and landlords and is designed to facilitate this wealth extraction and to protect it. The political parties of England are even more venal and worthless than those in Scotland. Truth and Justice are in exile, and the Public Good is trampled to death on the floor of the Stock Exchange.

All of this is well understood by those on the left, but equally, it is accepted as normal, so nothing is done. Which raises the question: just how do we in Scotland give the people the opportunity to express their collective voice on how best we should be governed? How can we implement such without it being hi-jacked by the self-serving system-rotarians who promise the Earth but do not deliver so much as a peat? In truth they are hostile to real democracy, as are all the presently constituted political parties.

What has happened, as far as Scottish independence is concerned, is that what the political parties declare as ends are, in fact means to accrue wealth, power, and the ownership of property. In this, all parties resemble each other and contain within them similar totalitarian desires. They only differ by degrees. Over time, the founding principles become increasingly vague. The goals that were set at the beginning become subject to pragmatism and cynicism. They appear as unreal to contemporary leaders. The party, in fact, becomes its own end. This, despite what the conference members in Aberdeen believed they were voting for, is what has happened to the SNP.

In Holyrood, corporate lobbying undoubtedly influences MSPs and Ministers. In Westminster, there is the craving for unlimited power, with a tight central executive structure in No 10 and a mania for control. In private meetings in Edinburgh, politicians increasingly do the bidding of vested interests, not of the electorate. The result is that outsourcing to consultants has become the modus operandi of the Scottish Government. Many vital infrastructure projects have been entrusted to private firms. For example, the much-criticised ScotWind auction leased responsibility for the development of renewable energy to the fossil fuel industry. The design of the National Care Service was outsourced to PricewaterhouseCoopers and KPMG. Two new ‘Green’ Freeports are to be developed on the Firth of Forth and the Cromarty Firth. Glasgow and Aberdeen are to become ‘Scottish Investment Zones’. No one can adequately explain just what any of this means, except that it is even more of an opportunity for deregulated corporate profit at the expense of the Scottish people. This is how Scotland is being asset-stripped. This is how corruption works.

In Westminster, the drift to authoritarianism runs parallel with the addiction to social control. Consider this, as posited by Alternative Weekly (14.10.25),

“What to do when your own long-held beliefs and goals are being weaponised against you and the public space becomes difficult, maybe dangerous, to occupy? Some get their relief from protesting – but what happens when the very men you are trying to reach cynically manipulate your goal, to give themselves even more power? Meantime, you get a prison sentence for demanding the thing – stop the violence – they now claim to be doing?”

For a party in power no finite amount of power is deemed sufficient. Starmer wants more and more and it is the power to have control over our lives. In order to realise this the party leader must render the party impotent. In Westminster all M.P.s are required to do as they are told. This way the party becomes an empty shell devoid of all reality and the concept of the Public Good dies within it. The quest for power has a natural affinity with corruption.

In Scotland, there isa  great need for a radical change in the way we do politics, for a revolution in ideas about the redistribution of wealth and the constitution. Instead, in Holyrood, what we get is a cosy atmosphere where progress – if that is what it is – is comfortably slow and uninterrupted by ideas. The SNP has deemed that this is what their party is for. Truth and Justice can whistle. It would not be unreasonable to assume, on the evidence of both Holyrood and Westminster, that political parties are designed, both publicly and within their own structure, to kill off in their members any sense of Truth and Justice. If any party member has an idea that does not contribute to an increase of party power and control – an idea about social justice, for example  – then they will find that they are no longer welcome: they will be expelled. So the party member with a conscience keeps their idea to themselves and by doing so betrays the Public Good. This is not democracy – it is mendacity and this tendency leads us to the place where Truth is denied a hearing. A desire for Truth is at odds with the conformity of received ideas, so vital to the political party.

In these post-literate days of smart phones and AI, when the human attention span has shrunk, it is increasingly impossible for modern politicians to keep in their minds the problems of society and at the same time to do what is expected of a party member. Who cares for one will neglect the other. If your ambition is to have a “career” then it is the party that comes first. Because of this almost everything modern political parties do runs contrary to the Public Good and supresses Truth and Justice. Instead of thinking our politicians take sides. They are by training partisan. However by instinct they are free. But as Keir Starmer so ably demonstrates, the freedom instinct has no place in party politics. As far as real political and social progress in concerned, in Scotland and the rest of the world, party politicians are useless.

An active mind requires meditation in order to express ideas. Instead of thinking that political parties prefer instruction. It is this insistence on instruction that erodes possibility. If we desire a new Scotland, then we urgently need to invent a new, bottom-up politics. The former will emerge from the latter. By plodding on, as we are doing, one issue after another, one inconclusive election after another, we will never rise up into the air above our crippling, patched-up and cowardly contradictions. To see these contradictions clearly is to be able to transcend them. Our future depends upon it. The way our political parties are constructed will make this transcendence a struggle. The conflict is between what we have and what we need and the struggle to get the politics we need will, however necessary,  sometimes be ugly. But struggle, after all, is the mother of change. Without change, we are going nowhere, and the financial elites and the landlords will keep smiling.