Passion, prejudice and panic… the three Ps that explain why politics is in such a mess

IWANT to talk about John Hamer Shawcross, the campaigner and activist known as Shawcross of Peterloo, a man who fought for the poor and the weak and became a great socialist and government minister, because I think he has something to tell us about the mess Scottish politics is in right now.

The fact that John Hamer

Shawcross never existed and is a character in a novel doesn’t actually matter because you often find the facts in fiction, and Howard Spring’s great political epic Fame is the Spur is particularly good at getting to the truth of how politicians behave. Spring wrote his novel in the 30s and never witnessed the Scottish political scene of 2020, but sometimes it reads like he did.

One of the moments that particularly jumped out for me when I read the book recently was towards the end of Shawcross’s career when he is considering the nature of politics. A colleague asks him what the main qualifications for success are in a politician and he boils it down to three things. “The politician must be an expert at appealing to panic, passion and prejudice,” he says. “When these do not exist, he must know how to create them at the right moment.” Now, that might sound a bit cynical to some people, but those three Ps – panic, passion and prejudice – have contributed to creating the current climate in Scotland. Both sides, unionist and nationalist, have used them (of course they have) but acknowledging them and talking about them could help us get out the other side. Let’s go through the three Ps one by one.

The first one, panic, is one we should all recognise, particularly in the weak idiots who have been stripping toilet roll from the supermarket shelves. Hamer Shawcross said the trick of an effective politician was to make people panic about a disease and persuade them they’re going to die unless they take the party’s medicine. In other words, the idea is to create a political coronavirus and tell the voters only you have the masks and the hand sanitiser.

The SNP has been particularly effective at this. In 2014, they told us we had to vote Yes or Scotland’s NHS would be privatised, and in 2018 the First Minister said there was a risk of powers being taken away from Holyrood. None of it was true and all of it was panic and the word written on the panic button was “Tories”.

The other side do it too. In 2014, prominent unionists told us Scottish independence would lead to economic chaos and even a threat to world security if Scotland got rid of Trident, but again, it was panic and the word written on the panic button this time was “Nats”. On the flip side, there were also wild promises (“oil boom!” “jobs boom!”) but the best approach, instead of panic or promises, would be pragmatism. No-one is trying to crush or remove Scottish identity, and independence would not lead to an

Irwin Allen disaster movie, so both sides should stop talking like those things are true.

The second P is passion, and it’s a word SNP politicians in particular love. They’re passionate about Scotland, and about standing up for Scotland, and the implication is that anyone who doesn’t agree is not passionate about Scotland, a.k.a. not a true Scot. But we know, don’t we, that passion can and does lead to anger, and we know anger is even easier to exploit but harder to control.

This is another of the lessons of Howard Spring’s novel. Some people have seen the book as a condemnation of Labour PM Ramsay Macdonald, but it’s much more subtle than that. Hamer Shawcross boils with passion as a young man but comes to realise change in Britain usually comes not with a great, passionate sweep of a sword but by infinite slow, organic degrees. He says we will not “stream magnificently to heaven on the tail of a fiery bloody rocket”.

It is the dreams of the fiery bloody rocket that the SNP needs to resist and control and there are signs in the more sensible parts of the party that they get it. Recently, the First Minister said proponents of independence need to make the case with passion but also with patience, and Andrew Wilson’s Growth Commission was part of an effort to temper the passion with common sense. “The reality,” said Wilson, “is change of such significance … is a process rather than an event.” No fiery rockets.

Which takes us to the third, final, and possibly most controversial P: prejudice. Again, both sides of the constitutional divide are guilty of it, but I think the SNP in particular hasn’t quite worked out how to deal with the problem. It’s as if they know they have to condemn it, but also know – as Hamer Shawcross did – that prejudice is one of the weapons at a politician’s disposal.

What I suppose I’m saying is the majority of SNP members and supporters are not prejudiced against the English, but some are because I’ve heard it myself. I’ve heard people say there are too many English in suchand-such a place or that we are “colonised by the English” and so forth. It’s also logical that if you’re prejudiced against the English, you’re going to vote for the SNP.

What the leadership of the party needs to work out is how to handle this prejudice and they’re conflicted. On the one hand, as soon as anyone whips out an inappropriate banner – “English go home” or whatever – the leadership condemn it. But what they’re not ready to accept is that nationalism itself attracts people who hate or distrust other nationalities. Why seek to overly control those who are guilty of prejudice when prejudice is one of the emotions you can appeal to?

The answer is to recognise that – powerful as they are – prejudice, panic and passion only take you so far, and that to progress further, nationalists need to heed the advice of another great novelist John Buchan. It was Buchan who warned against “artificial nationalism” that relies on differences and instead promoted “sane nationalism” based on what’s economically good for the nation, and in Scottish terms, this could mean more independence than we have but not as much independence as many nationalists want. Why not put that case to Scotland? Why not put it calmly, and without prejudice or panic? People would listen.

What the leadership of the party needs to work out is how to handle this prejudice and they’re conflicted