Going in search of Scotland’s future identity

MDOUGLAS ALEXANDER: Y MOTHER worked as a doctor in the NHS. My father was a minister in the Church of Scotland. Both of them were inspired by their Christian beliefs to engage in the common life of the community. We lived above a café for the homeless and a meeting room in which UCS Shop Stewards gathered and the Scottish Branch of Anti-Apartheid was formed. I was delivering Christian Aid envelopes before I was delivering Labour Party leaflets. In the kitchen of my father’s manse was a poster that read: “Live more simply so others can simply live.”

Tony Blair famously said he chose the Labour Party. I didn’t – I was born into it. My father and mother are both lifelong Labour members. My dad joined Glasgow University Labour Club in the late 1950s alongside his friends John Smith and Donald Dewar. My mother is active in the local Labour Party in Renfrewshire to this day.

I joined the Labour Party in 1982, motivated to do so by the unemployment and loss of hope I witnessed following the closure of the Linwood Car Plant. My earliest and formative experiences of politics were not of repeated success, but of bitter defeats – in 1983, 1987 and 1992. Part of my response to those defeats was a growing consciousness of the Scottish dimension of my politics and I reacted to and rejected Margaret Thatcher’s intolerance towards and ignorance of much of what we in Scotland held dear.

At that time if felt like a struggle for Scotland’s soul. And for me, and a lot of other Scots, it was Labour politicians of that generation, like Dewar, Smith, Gordon Brown and Robin Cook, who gave voice not only to our concerns but also to our hopes. They held out the possibility of a better Scottish nation – by their commitment to constitutional change certainly, but even more by their shared commitment to social and economic change and solidarity with the poor, even when that was not an easy path. As democratic socialists, they never saw a contradiction in working for a better Scotland and a better Britain.

I am forever proud that one of the f irst acts of the incoming Labour government in 1997 was to set out the Scotland Act, giving birth to Scotland’s f irst democratic parliament. But nationalism has never held any appeal for me. I believe that our Scottish Parliament could and should be not simply an instrument of greater democratic accountability, but also a workshop in which a fairer, more socially just Scotland could be forged. As a democratic socialist myself, ideals have shaped my sense of politics more than identity. I am proud of my Scottishness – certainly. But defined only by my Scottishness – certainly not. I am, and always have been, much more interested in abolishing poverty than abolishing Britain.

BGERRY HASSAN: EHIND every political position and philosophy there is a personal story. My parents were born and grew up in Dundee. We lived in a council estate, and my father, Eddie, worked for NCR while I was growing up, while my mother, Jean, managed a chemist shop pharmacy. My dad was in the Communist Party, not unusual for a Dundee shop steward. My mum was a community activist.

My parents believed in two powerful things. One was that in the future, things would get better and the world fairer, and that for working-class children like myself there

I am, and always have been, much more interested in abolishing poverty than abolishing Britain

would be more opportunity and possibilities. It was a world filled with optimism and hope. As importantly, they also believed in Britain. Both of them voted against Europe in 1975 – “a capitalist club” as they saw it – and a Scottish Assembly in 1979, because they wanted to believe in a socialist Britain. Post1979 they parted in politics. My father made the short journey from Stalinism to Scottish nationalism. My mum stopped being an activist while continuing to believe in Britain, but shorn of that earlier hope.

Growing up in Dundee in the 1980s I joined the Labour Party, and never found it a satisfying political experience. I came to Glasgow in the late 1980s, and always remember when I first went canvassing for Labour in local elections and then a general election. I would go to these huge, soulless estates filled with poorly maintained, badly designed tower blocks and ask people to vote Labour, and feel ashamed doing so.

There seemed to me a profound absence of responsibility, as many Labour members closed their eyes to the mediocre services the party offered. Everything that was wrong with the world was the fault of the “wicked Tories” and their “cuts”. After 24 years I eventually left the Labour Party, long after I had detached myself from it as an active member, but still keeping a sense of belonging and a backstory.

There is a pronounced Scottish Labour entitlement culture, which has been part of the political establishment of the last 50 years. There are also parts of Scottish nationalism, with their romanticising of our history, which seem to have a similar denial of the problems our society faces. Neither of these traditions, to my mind, has been good at addressing what a social justice Scotland would look like, and the reasons we have fallen so short.

The more generous, pluralist elements of Scottish nationalism and the self-government movement, in which I would include the mainstream of the SNP, as well as parts of Scottish Labour when it has been at its best, have been about a profound maturing of us as a society, and of our politics. I don’t see this maturity as being about a choice between talking or not talking about independence. I want to be passionate about economic and social justice, and about political power and constitutional change. It shouldn’t be either/or because that’s restricting and too black and white. Despite the powerful storm clouds gathering and the crisis of mainstream politics, which I don’t for a minute underestimate, I feel enormously positive about Scotland’s future.

IDOUGLAS ALEXANDER: JOINED the party at about the same time as Gerry, in Renfrewshire, and if it’s any consolation it wasn’t always very satisfying for me either! More profoundly, it was dissatisfying because of the impotence of opposition. Politics for me has always involved not simply the holding of ideals but the pursuit of power in order to give expression to those ideals. You talked of feeling shame in the 1980s when asking people to vote Labour because of their housing conditions. I felt that we were letting people down badly in those years by failing to confront the changes we needed to make, both to win and to govern.

It was also in those years that I came to believe passionately in the cause of Scottish devolution. The 1980s and early 1990s were a time when many in our generation became more conscious of our Scottishness. Was it that I was reading James Kelman or Alistair Gray? Was it that as well as reading Marxism Today I was reading Radical Scotland? Was it listening to Hue and Cry, Deacon Blue or The Proclaimers? Or was it simply that Thatcherism threw into more stark relief what I believed about my politics and about Scotland? You criticise many Labour members for lacking responsibility and blaming everything on the “wicked Tories and their cuts”. Of course the cuts were real (and so too were the debts), but the undoubtedly poor record of too many local authorities as providers of social housing led me to support local stock transfers to allow housing associations, in order to pioneer new approaches to social housing. But let me make a broader point. One of the main reasons I so passionately supported Scottish devolution was my belief that it would allow us to leave behind the sense of disempowerment and grievance that many felt in the 1990s.

Scotland today is a more self-confident nation – I would argue in no small measure due to the policies and prosperity Labour delivered in the years after 1997. Yet, I continue to see in the character of Scottish nationalism a determination to cultivate a sense of disempowerment and grievance. Think of Alex Salmond’s observation that independence would see England “lose a surly lodger and gain a good neighbour”. In truth, the United Kingdom is a house we’ve built together… and you can’t be a lodger in your own house. The Nationalists are of course entitled to hold their beliefs. But I believe that the way they seek to advance their case at times detracts and distracts from the possibility of Scottish politics being able to move beyond precisely the kind of “avoidance of responsibility” you describe. Another diff iculty I have with nationalism is that it is an unfortunate and inevitable consequence of their political aim – of separate statehood – that the Scottish Nationalists focus so heavily on the apparatus and trappings of the state.

My politics is not about empowering the apparatus of the state. It is about empowering people and, in particular, those who have never had power, personal or collective, in their communities. And in the years ahead I believe my party must aim to establish, nurture and sustain the relationships and common life that are forged through common action for the common good. You ended your response by recollecting your parents and their beliefs about the future. That spoke to me. Part of Labour’s task, I believe, is to remind people that the greatest hope we have is each other, and that this is not incompatible with hope for ourselves and our families. It is also to remind people that wanting a better future for Scotland is not incompatible with wanting to remain part of a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic and multi-national United Kingdom.

IGERRY HASSAN WOULD like to ask in what way is Scotland this social democratic nation that we all refer to? I have slowly come to the conclusion that not only is Scotland not as social democratic as it likes to think itself – which is fairly uncontroversial – but also that something more is at work.

Scotland is a social democracy for its middle-class professional interest groups. The systems of government and public spending work best for those most entrenched in the system; it has always been like this since the expansion of the Scottish state in late Victorian times. But devolution and the establishment of the Scottish Parliament have exaggerated this effect; a culture of scrutiny, transparency and accountability has actually worked for the insider groups in the system. And the policy choices have worked for the middle classes. For example, free care for the elderly and abolition of tuition fees have been implemented without any due care or interest for their distributional consequences.

Scotland has the worst health inequalities and male life expectancy in all Western Europe, yet we still talk blithely of our nation as this great social democracy. What we characterise as Scottish social democracy is in fact communitarianism. It is true that the Scottish public realm doesn’t exhibit the marketised, outsourced, corporate capture which we see in England, but how do we begin to challenge the innate assumption across Scottish public life that we are on the right track to a better, fairer Scotland? Shouldn’t we begin to show a little bit of constructive self-criticism?

And this begs the critical question: what difference will independence make to Scotland as a society? The SNP strategy seems to be to present independence as riskfree, by removing as much uncertainty and rupture as is possible. This is the logic of retaining the sterling currency and the monarch as head of state in an independent Scotland. And the pro-union parties – Labour, Lib Dems and Tories – seem equally lacking in substance, and have shown themselves unwilling or unable to make the positive case for the Union. This situation is shaped by a politics of bitter division and a general lack of respect and empathy for differing opinions. Debating unionism versus nationalism doesn’t help us. Most Scots don’t see themselves reflected in either camp. And yet each of these sides, because they have loud voices and a sense of self-importance, tend to think they speak for a large part of Scotland. And in so doing they exclude most of us.

Despite the crisis of mainstream politics I feel enormously positive about Scotland’s future

n T he full version of Alexander and Hassan’s exchanges can be found online at scotsman. com/opinion n Gerry Hassan and Douglas Alexander will continue the debate in conversation at the SO LAS Festival on Saturday 23 June at 12:30pm at Wiston, near Biggar. Details at solasfestival.co.uk