We’re better off without grudge politics

ONE could hear them choking on their cappuccinos in Murrell Towers when Greta Thurnberg firmly declined to buy into the proposition that Scotland is a “worldleader” in combating climate change.

This is not supposed to happen. International figures who chance upon our shores usually assent to self-awarded status symbols out of politeness rather than personal knowledge only to find their diplomacy turned into instant headlines, useful to the regime. Greta was a bit craftier.

The claim of “world leadership” rests on Scotland setting a net zero target for 24 years hence rather than the laggards of Whitehall whose ambition is for five years later, so “we” must be greener than “them”. It is complete nonsense since outcomes are created by actions rather than targets, as Scotland’s dismal record on turning renewable energy into jobs should remind us. As indeed should the fact these hallowed targets have been missed for the past three years. So what is left but words?

Anyway, as Ms Thurnberg pointed out, no country’s targets are up to much for those who share her perspective on climate change and the measures to counter it. The job of government, on the other hand, is to balance the desirable with the attainable so boasting about “targets” without any roadmap is irrelevant.

Ms Thurnberg’s spoke in the wheel of spin chimed with a book I am currently reading with a perhaps surprising degree of consensus, A Difference of Opinion, by Jim Sillars. He has always been an interesting figure in Scottish public life characterised by a willingness to change his position and speak with an independent voice.

This led him from being a Labour MP of ability to forming his own breakaway party, which crashed and burned, to joining the SNP and becoming its deputy leader and then, not least because of his marriage to Margo Macdonald and the treatment she received at the hands of its leadership, persisting as an astute and free-thinking critic.

So where do I agree with him? Sillars dismisses with some contempt the Salmond/sturgeon rhetoric about an “anti-scottish” agenda in Westminster. He deplores the “grudge and grievance” politics which flows from this premise. And he weeps – as I do – for the failure to use Holyrood’s powers to show what can be done, rather than be constantly indignant about what (allegedly) cannot be done.

“I am not a big ‘N’ nationalist,” he writes. “In fact I doubt if I qualify as a nationalist at all. My conversion to independence was on the view that Scotland would be better off economically and, therefore, socially if we were”. That is a perfectly respectable position which is there to be argued with – but it owes nothing to “grudge and grievance” or indeed the empty “world-leading” boasts.

Sillars supported Brexit in line with long-held opposition starting with the Common Market. Incidentally, he recalls sharing a platform with Willie Ross who was in a Labour Cabinet seeking EEC membership. The two expressed widely differing views – which went entirely unremarked, not least by Willie Ross.

Can anyone imagine that happening in today’s politics which demand conformity above all other virtues? His Brexit stance further alienated him from the SNP leadership by disturbing the pretence that everyone in Scotland loves the EU. Sillars is scathing about the “power grab” nonsense which wasted many months when every sinew of effort should have been going into making the best of Brexit – the opportunities as well as challenges it created instead of a false narrative about “power grabs”.

Sillars wonders: “How could any rational person expect the UK government, faced with a deliberate misinformation campaign that painted them as setting out to ‘shaft’ Scotland, treat the Scottish government as a partner it could trust? So, in my view, the Scottish government placed itself without influence on the UK side of the negotiations”.

This mentality persists because it is one the SNP’S core vote want to hear – there is nothing like a constant diet of alleged persecution to feed the certainty of fundamentalism. As Sillars writes:

“Nicola Sturgeon’s view of statecraft is that she can advance towards independence best by being at constant loggerheads with Westminster, revealing it as an inherently anti-scottish institution. That fires up the party but does it serve the nation’s interests? I think not”.

On the great issues of the day – Covid amelioration and recovery, translation of environmental targets into job-creating realities, making the best of Brexit – it is overwhelmingly in Scotland’s interests for the two Governments to work collaboratively. It is also, I fear, now near to impossible – so we live with the false narrative while Scotland stagnates, socially and economically.

This week, I’ve been attending a couple of memorial events for friends who died last year. George Mackie was a son of the Mearns who played rugby for Scotland and farmed most of his life in Essex. Ian Taylor, whose investment made Harris Tweed Hebrides possible, had a father from Ayrshire who followed the familiar ICI route to the north-west of England.

Both events were heavily populated by Scots, many living in England because that is where family and career routes took them. I am very happy to engage in the economic arguments with Jim Sillars or anyone else. He at least recognises there are also human factors underpinning our union, with or without a capital ‘U’, which run just as deep.

Sillars’ Brexit stance alienated him from SNP leadership by disturbing the pretence that everyone loves the EU