economy - culture - media, economy - culture - media...

Robin McAlpine

I'm reading an awful lot just now which analyses why the liberals in the US lost the election and the public, the former by a little, the latter by a lot. It is mainly coming form a campaign-analytical perspective. What happened in the US won't happen in the same way here (we have more civilised regulations), but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be paying attention.

At Common Weal we definitely have. In fact we've been asking ourselves the question for much of the last year, long before the US election. Rightwing ideas are gaining ground and leftwing ideas are losing ground – if not always in popularity then certainly in visibility. How do we learn from what has happened and reverse this?

One good analysis emphasised three weaknesses, encouraging left-liberals in the US to focus on economy, culture and media. The author encourages us to repeat it over and over to ourselves. While the picture is different in Britain and Scotland, it isn't that different. It's a good lesson.

The core of this is 'economy'. Of course, the only people who think of the economy as the economy are market traders and politicians. The rest of us call this 'quality of life'. I promise, 99 per cent of the population wouldn't give a monkeys about the state of 'the economy' so long as their were financially secure and had access to good public services.

This is a problem. We have been encouraged (or tricked) to see 'economy' as shorthand for 'everything'. It is at times remarkable how completely politics has swallowed the idea that everything boils down to GDP growth. For example, I can't count the number of times I hear 'economy' and 'economist' when the person speaking actually means 'public finances' and 'accountant'.

So this is the first key; we on the left need to be better at disaggregating 'economy' into its real functions and focus on those instead of abstractions. It's about work-life balance. It's about pay. It's about dignity, respect and security. It's about rapid access to health care. It's about giving a small business a fighting chance. It's about housing.

Every single special interest tries to do the opposite. They seek to turn issues into simple economy questions. Watching the landlord sector pretending that them owning someone else's house and making them pay through the nose for it is a benefit to the economy and therefore society is simply an egregious example. You're not giving, you're taking. You're not investing, you're extracting. Your productivity is zero.

But Common Weal is already pretty good at particularising the economy. We have a lot of material which helps us to drag people away from stupid 'GDP brain' and back onto 'life as lived'. The problem isn't whether we have good stories, it's whether anyone is hearing them.

That's where culture and media come in. Culture is the more complicated of the two. In an awful lot of my writing I'm wrestling with the question of how culture and policy intermingle. I do not mean 'arts', I mean 'how we see ourselves'. There is no escaping human nature and we are all immersed in one culture or another, a set of assumptions, beliefs and expectations we believe to be self-explanatory and self-evident.

It is perfectly possible to speak to someone from outside their culture. It is even possible to change the nature of someone's culture from outside. It is certainly possible to do both from inside that culture. But there is a core condition; that culture must be treated with respect. Our sense of culture is very much our sense of ourselves.

For example, much of a myth or a fabrication as it might be, I read Willian McIlvanney Docherty when I was still at school and it seemed to hum with a morality and an attitude and outlook on life that chimed very closely with my own experiences in a small town. That Tam Docherty only lost one fight and it was the one where he was in the wrong stuck with me, even as I knew that he should have been solving his problems without violence.

So you can tell me that and I'll agree, but if you do so by talking about 'knuckle-dragging patriarchs whose toxic masculinity must be fought aggressively and relentlessly', my back is up, because those are my friends you're talking about and whatever their flaws, they're just not knuckle-dragging patriarchs defined by toxic masculinity.

This is where so much that has gone wrong finds its fuel. There used to be (still are) many cultures involved in left politics and they used to rub along one way or another. Then one of those cultures 'did a Trump', decided it wanted to overturn everything and justified to itself that any method used was inherently moral since the cause was inherently moral.

There is a strong case for being extremely conscious about the social impact of language (including body language), a subject that was a primary focus on my degree. There is of course a case for policing language – I spent years of my life telling friends what terminologies they were using that were pointlessly offensive (they often didn't realise). 

But that is not the same as the hyper-aggressive and frankly vindictive cancel culture that emerged and which demanded total obedience from all other tribes, all other cultures. It is that which so many people feel has treated their own culture with utter disrespect. 

Say what you want about it, the Scottish Ulster Orange Lodge community in Scotland is a real, genuine, historic culture. You may well not like aspects of it (there are many aspects not to like), but that applies to Islam, or Christianity, or frankly any other organised ideology I can think of. We would never dream of demanding those be banned.

So how do you persuade people that what you mean isn't 'respect for anyone but not if they're white, working class and support Rangers'? I don't think you can the way some of us behave. This problem is replicated across all sorts of cultures of people who didn't go to university and come out with some kind of social science and humanities degree before moving into public sector management.

I mean, that's a narrow spectrum of people on which to build a revolution. But again, I think Common Weal has done a pretty good job of not getting very far bogged down in the moras of culture wars and divisive ideologies. 

It's the third aspect where we've been looking hard at ourselves; media. In fact the framing of 'media' in the US case is quite specific. That is to do with the very specific right-wing take-over of media, first through the purchase of newspapers, then the purchase of TV news stations, then the capturing of the podcast space. There are large swathes of the US where the only news is Fox news, and in those places the Democrats are hated.

Better media regulation in Britain limits this effect (though not enough), and yet still there is a problem – though it's not so much 'media' as 'being heard'. If we think of this in terms of communication, how is the politics of the left manifesting itself in the lives of ordinary people? Not very well, is my conclusion.

It's not just our habit of tearing off into subjects we obsess over and the public is indifferent to (if not hostile). It's not just the biased media landscape. It's that, for most people, what we're saying on a day by day basis is simply not relevant to their lives. Even where they agree (for example with the horrors in Palestine), it isn't relevant to them.

And in as far as we do anything to communicate with the public we do it sporadically, often in the form of a moan or complaint and often in a tone that isn't appealing – sanctimonious, self-certain, hectoring. Plus we're often lazy, producing content for us and our friends to share between ourselves in our own social media bubble.

We've been thinking about this a lot and we've reached a conclusion – Common Weal has to be solving problems and offering change every day, focussed on what makes the lives of people actually better. We have built up such a body of policy work that we could double it and often all we'd be doing is refining and expanding the same work. 

Of course we will continue to do this, but if we spent our first decade building up a large and solid body of work to create a Common Weal vision, increasingly we're going to focus on 'so what?'. So what does that mean for people's lives? So what should make anyone care about this? So what if you've got a clever idea?

We drew this conclusion last summer and in the background we've been working away on a strategy to change direction in this way since. We're finally nearly there and will tell you all about it next week.

Because fundamentally, yes, it is economy, culture and media which is holding Scotland's left back from actually reaching the public effectively. Well, that and money. We've seen what it looks like when a nation is stuck with a liberal left which doesn't speak to people on these terms. Hopefully we may start to show what it could look like if we got this right.