Scotland's Cautious Radicalism

Robin McAlpine 16th September 2021

Is Scotland conservative or Conservative, radical or cautious, left wing or just likes to think it is? This measuring of the 'Scottish soul' seems never-ending.

We are compared with England and mostly by those who oppose independence trying to demonstrate that Scotland's 'left-ism' is a myth, that social attitudes surveys (a very blunt tool for measuring this complex issue) prove we're basically the same as our southern neighbours (which they don't).

This is a hellish trap for Scotland to be drawn into, an unwinnable debate about the virtually unmeasurable. It is almost certainly more fruitful to look instead at what Scotland seems to want here and now for ourselves and then compare it to what we get.

If we did we'd find a wide gap between what people seem to want and what Scotland's leaders then deliver. Without that gap Scotland would look like a very different country.

So what can we say about the Scotland that Scots seem to say they want – and if we're not measuring that through abstract questions in social attitude surveys - what would help us to draw conclusions?

Let's first look at elections. Scotland keeps choosing governments to the left of the governments England chooses. That is pretty well a fact. But the centrists argue this is purely the result of the SNP being such a strange, hybrid vehicle, a diverse church of many different views.

But is it really? SNP branches almost never submit motions which you could call 'centrist' (and never ones you would call right wing). Right wing policies like the Growth Commission only ever come from the party machinery.

Look at the weekend's conference – if the policies proposed and passed at the SNP conference were adopted and delivered wholeheartedly by the Scottish Government, it would represent a very substantial leap to the left. If the SNP was really so broad a church there would be some serious opposition to this, but they all passed substantially and all but one passed overwhelmingly.

There is unwavering and powerful opposition to Trident and overwhelming support for collectivist policies like a National Energy Company, a National Transport Company or a string of other similar proposals in recent years. The membership even voted against its own government's policy both on the National Energy Company and on Free Ports.

The votes at the Alba conference were even further to the left and it is not just progress to independence or women's rights which are causing defections but also party policy. And while Alba and the Greens might see each other as diametrically opposed, on the majority of policy issues there is very little between them at all.

Labour in Scotland seems so traumatised by its loss of power and so polarised by the constitutional debate that Corbynism didn't stick, but even under Anas Sarwar it looks to the left of Starmer's Westminster Labour Party. No-one would mistake the Scottish Tories for a left-of-centre party but on the whole they are nothing like as ideologically extreme as their Westminster compatriots.

Across the party spectrum in Scotland we see a clear concentration of activists in the space between the really quite seriously left and the soft centre left and little that moves any further than centre right.

But the argument goes that this is only party activists, a rare and unusual beast. According to Scottish establishment dogma, the reason the SNP is so successful is that its leader basically ignores the radical elements of her party and delivers the kind of reliable, centrist politics that 'real' Scots want.

Setting aside that even social attitude surveys suggest that she is to the right of general attitudes on say taxing the wealthy to pay for public services (72 per cent of Scots think current income distribution is unfair, link as above), is there something which could tell more directly us what a genuine group of representative Scots would do?

Yes, there is – there are the final reports of two Citizen's Assemblies (here https://www.citizensassembly.scot/main-report and here https://www.climateassembly.scot/full-report). Both are wide-ranging and both are really quite remarkably radical. Both produced lists of policies – from a Citizen's Chamber of the Scottish Parliament to a 'presumption against imports' – which Scotland's mainstream commentators would consider far too radical to be supported by the general population.

But this precisely is the general population – a hundred people selected at random in each case, given time, space and support to think through a big question and propose a solution. And in both cases the final reports could have easily been produced by Common Weal.

In the narrative of Scotland's political and media establishment, we're a small-c conservative nation where an organisation like Common Weal is an outlier. The evidence quite strongly suggests that Common Weal inhabits a space pretty near the centre of what the public actually want and that it's the Scottish Establishment which is the outlier.

There are a number of different ways of looking at this. It is probably fair to say that Scotland is more small-c conservative than it is radical, but it is a small-c conservativism that is about the pace of change, not the direction. It certainly isn't big-C conservative, a rightwards-facing ideology. Scotland wants to change carefully, but it really does want to change. Not a jog but a steady march.

What is consistent in all of the above is the nature of the change. What Scotland demonstrates is a strong instinct for collectivism. It is the idea of 'working together for all' that underpins rejecting low-tax port jurisdictions or wanting to see a public-good energy company established.

We saw this in the pandemic – Scotland was simply more willing to accept collective sacrifice for the collective good. It is not a random or sporadic view; this idea of a collectivist will is pretty universal wherever you look in terms of Scottish attitudes to public policy.

So you can call it whatever you like – in reality Scotland appears to want a steady but consistent move towards a kind of nation in which the interests of the collective of citizens are pursued at the expense of the interest of vested interests. How far Scotland is willing to move in that direction is open to speculation, but there is little to suggest it's only 'one small step for appearances sake'.

In the end, the mood in Scotland seems best understood as a paradoxical 'cautious radicalism'; real, serious change but carefully approached. 

The primary opposition to this comes not from large blocks of citizens but from the really very small Scottish 'ruling class'. The main obstacle to things tipping in favour of the former is a government less in thrall to the latter.