A Glimmer of Something (it’s not light)

The attempt to separate Malcolm Offord from the fascist party he has joined is now the shared task of a wide range of players from the far-right tabloid press (see the Scottish Daily Express here); to the dregs of the Alba party (see here), to the lobbyists and columnists who surround him.

The task is to focus on his (supposed) qualities and studiously avoid the political project he has joined. So we can admire his lovely hair [Admiring Malcom Offord’s Jaguar] as Chris Deerin does, or the fact he is ‘Greenock-raised’ as Marie Macklin does ‘Malcolm Offord, the Tory turned Reform candidate – a glimmer of light‘, but we must not, cannot, examine the policies of the party he has joined.

In August last year, Nigel Farage, the Prime Minister in-waiting, outlined his plans for government.

He promised uniformed officers raiding Britain’s towns and cities, disappearing people off the street for rendition to countries they’ve never been to, with no recourse to legal protections, claiming that it’s what “normal countries do.”

Taking a leaf out of Trump’s book Farage proposes deporting 600,000 asylum seekers in a five-year period. Farage confirmed that women and children would also be detained and deported under Reform’s plans. Answering a question from Sky News’ political correspondent Serena Barker Singh, Farage said: “Women and children, everybody on arrival will be detained.”

You and I have spent the last year watching a timeline of Trump’s ICE patrols disappearing people off the streets. This is what Farage, and Offord are proposing here.

But Offord’s apologists can’t detach him from the reality of Farage’s plans. Just as Sarwar is tied to Starmer’s political project, and just as Ruth Davidson couldn’t distance herself from Boris Johnson, Offord, and his scribes can’t distance themselves from Reform UK’s racist agenda and fascist politics.

Remove the Shame

In Ece Temelkuran’s instant classic ‘How to Lose a Country – the Seven Steps from Democracy to Dicatorship‘ – she outlines how authoritarianism swept across Turkey, and reflects on ways people can resist the same happening in our own countries. In a key chapter called ‘Remove the Shame’, she talks about ‘the normalisation of shamelessness’ and the role of a pliant media in the country’s descent under President Erdoğan. We are not immune to a similar descent; in fact we’re a good way there already.

So while Offord’s fans celebrate his ‘straight-talking’ or admire his flashy car, or celebrate the fact that he “… delivered, as a UK Government minister, £800 million in Levelling Up funding for deprived communities across Scotland’s central belt. It is exactly this kind of bottom-up growth and investment that is so badly needed and which all parties should aspire to” – as Marie Macklin did, they are diverting our gaze from the reality of Reform’s disgusting plans.

He has the allure of the businessman, the confidence of the privileged, and it’s like moths to the flame that his media acolytes fly. For most of them, operating around a tiny bandwidth of economic and political understanding, Offord is the answer, and they will quite happily thole, the, er, more brutalist aspects of Reform’s political project.

But there’s another reason. All of the political indicators point to the collapse of the traditional party political powerbase in Britain. Political commentators, just like funders, will happilly, loyally switch their allegiance to whatever the new political power is, even if it’s undeniably fascist. While for the red-tops such as the Daily Express this is not a political journey, for people like the Scotland Editor of the New Statesman, you’d have thought it might be. Apparently not.

The reason why it’s so easy for supposedly centrist lobbyist-journalists like Deerin, is that the parties that used to represent their bulwark against Scottish self-determination – the Scottish Labour Party and the Conservatives – are about to be obliterated, and they know this.

Give with a choice between an avowedly fascist political agenda – that supports the Union – and anything else – they’ll go with Reform UK. If you think that’s incredible, you’ve not been paying attention to the depths of opportunism to which these people will go.

Over the next few months, as the political establishment collapses, watch as the media class shifts its allegiances to an explicitly fascist programme. There is no threshold for these people. Other realignments are happening. As we write, Zac Polanski has announced he is in favour of Scottish and Welsh independence [Zack Polanski backs Scottish and Welsh independence]. Small beer you might think, but such is the rapid disintegration of political norms, it might not be.

There is a dark irony about the Unionist comentariat abandoning the Labour and Tories for Reform. It’s called the Law of Unintended Consequences. Consistent polling shows that the idea (and reality) of a Farage government turbo-boosts support for Scottish independence. This is the Endgame. 

Of course there’s a grave danger of Accelerationism here – the idea that ‘accelerating’ social and cultural decline to collapse the existing liberal democratic order will usher in a new political system. In the absence of a strong and deep-rooted independence movement with a coherent pathway and strategy for change, the danger is that Faragism brings dangerous mayhem rather than an enlightened Scottish democracy. History tells us to deal with the hand we are dealt with though, and the obvious answer would be to (re) build a vibrant new movement for change as the forces of Capital and Union collapse in on their own failures.

Happy New Year!