Joyce McMillan: Scots need more than nationalism

Published on Wednesday 11 May 2011 17:44

Alex Salmond must work hard to make his majority government looks beyond its core priority

THERE'S a quotation that Alex Salmond should have emblazoned above his First Minister's desk, following the SNP's stunning victory in last week's Scottish Parliament election. It's not "The Buck Stops Here", as favoured by President Harry Truman, or even "Scotland The Brave".

No, the quote Alex Salmond needs is that famous one from the final letters of the heroic First World War nurse, Edith Cavell. "Patriotism is not enough," she said, as she awaited execution by a German firing-squad.

Alex Salmond is about to learn - if he does not know already - just how right she was, not only about patriotism, but also about the limitations of its ideological big brother, political nationalism.

This is not to say, of course, that the principle of national self-determination does not matter. On the contrary, it is vital for any self-respecting national community to feel that, at the deepest level, it holds its future in its own hands; and in electing an SNP government with a commanding majority, Scottish voters have clearly signalled that if independence seems to represent the best route to the kind of Scotland we want, then sooner or later, we may choose to take it.

None of that, though, makes Salmond's task any easier, as he returns to Bute House this week.

For the vast majority of Scottish voters, after all - including the key 12 or 13 per cent who switched their votes to the SNP last Thursday - the important thing is to clearly define the Scotland we want, and to start working out how to get there. Most people in Scotland support the existence of the Scottish Parliament, and would like it to have more powers.

For the middle-of-the-road majority, though, these constitutional issues represent a backdrop to the real narrative of politics, which is about the building of a good society: one that combines freedom with solidarity, that offers social justice and genuine equality of opportunity, that supports efficient and respected public services, and promotes an intelligent and creative business sector capable of operating within the law.

Every nationalist in Scotland who is in triumphalist mode this week should therefore bear in mind just how popular the British state was in Scotland, so long as it held true to the welfare state principles of the post-war settlement.

Scottish voters have put their trust in the SNP, this time around, because all three of the UK parties are now seen, in their different ways, to have betrayed, or failed adequately to defend, that social-democratic ideal.And that outcome has been growing more likely ever since the moment, back in 2008, when Nicola Sturgeon brought the British Medical Association conference in Edinburgh to its feet with a principled defence of the NHS, more rousing than anything uttered by a Labour politician in the past 20 years.

What has landed on Alex Salmond's desk, in other words, is a demand that he deliver, in 21st century Scotland - using independence if he must, and greater fiscal powers if he can - a kind of social democratic settlement that every other mainstream UK party has gradually abandoned as impossible, under postmodern conditions.

This doesn't mean, of course, that Salmond is bound to fail. The neoliberal economic model that has dominated UK politics since the late 1970s crashed in flames in the financial crisis of 2008, and has in any case shown itself incapable either of properly husbanding the earth's natural resources, or of delivering a just and compassionate society. #

Alex Salmond and his team are bright, thoughtful and decent people, inheritors of a proud tradition of enlightenment theory about the nature of the well-governed society; and they are probably as well placed as any group of politicians in Europe to join a new global movement to overturn the tired economic orthodoxies of the last generation.

Salmond's problem, though, is that he leads a party that is dedicated not to the project of reinventing social democracy, but to the single aim of achieving Scottish independence. Its unifying belief lies in an ideology that, even at its best, offers no serious analysis of the big forces at play in our society and economy, no insight into the problems that link, say, discarded industrial workers from Baltimore to Bathgate, and no strategy for successfully resisting those destructive pressures that have recently made mincemeat of the economies of Ireland, Greece and Portugal.

The party is not even sure whether its dream of a future Scotland involves a low-tax haven for global capitalism, or a high-tax nirvana for beleaguered public-sector workers. And among its ranks there are many who still cling - oddly and alarmingly - to the fundamentalist idea that Scottishness is intrinsically good, and Britishness intrinsically bad; and that independence itself will therefore solve many problems, and make all the rest much easier to tackle.

Skilful though he is, in other words, at navigating a path between the convictions of his party, and the more complex wishes of the nation for which he speaks, the majority that Salmond won last week will make it more difficult for him to achieve that compromise, and to fend off the demands of nationalism at its simplistic worst.In the Europe of 2011, it may be that a centre-left national party like the SNP is the best starting-point we can find for a new politics of solidarity and effective community.

Yet for all that, we would be wise not to fool ourselves about just how fragile the connection can be between a nationalist project and one that truly cares for values of freedom, justice and peace.

And as we embark on the next half-decade of SNP government, we should also acknowledge just how much, in Scotland, the forging of that link depends on the skill and wisdom of a tiny core group of SNP politicians: a group surrounded on one side by global ideological sharks who want a rapid and brutal end to Scotland's dream of social democracy; and on the other by members of their own party who dream only of Scotland's "freedom", as if 21st century politics raised no other questions and needed no other answer.