Lesley Riddoch: Lack of ideological debate something of a relief

Published on Friday 29 April 2011 14:34

This campaign has contained the usual features, except party dogma has been missing

WHAT'S been missing in this Holyrood election? There's been a major poll upset. There's been a spectacular televised gaffe. There've been leaders' debates aplenty, scaremongering, bribes to voters and a general avoidance of detail about the cuts that lie ahead.

In other words there have been all the usual components of a Scottish election.

What there hasn't been is ideology.

Monetarism, socialism, New Labourism, nationalism and free- market Liberalism - all the underlying dogmas which used to draw clear blue, red, yellow and Saltire-striped lines between the parties have been missing in this battle for control of Holyrood.

There used to be several immutable voting trends at work in Scotland. If the SNP wins on 5 May almost all must be considered gey wobbly.

Workers used to vote Labour, employers voted Tory.

The west voted Labour, the east didn't.

Leafy suburbs voted Tory, leafless urban areas wouldn't.

The north voted Lib Dem, the south didn't.

Nationalists voted SNP, unionists didn't.

The old faultlines that divided Scotland once looked as formidable and enduring as Hadrian's Wall. But different voting systems have given Scots new voting experiences.

Old loyalties certainly remain.

The polls suggest much of the SNP's support depends upon Alex Salmond's willingness to sideline his ideological belief in independence. In truth much depends upon the substantial personal presence of Alex Salmond himself. With another leader, those old partisan fault-lines could re-establish themselves overnight.

There is weather and there is climate. Four years is too short a time to declare shifts in voting allegiance are permanent. But if Scotland rejects Labour and embraces the SNP again this week, it will be in the absence of any ideological debate. In many ways that's a relief.

Who (bar the money men) misses the dogma days of Thatcher when private was automatically good, public was bad and poverty self-inflicted?

Equally though, who (bar the same money men) misses the old loadsamoney Blair/Brown days when private was also good (as long as it was big) public was good (in partnership with big business) and small, local, alternative or community-controlled were small beer and off-message?

What did ideology ever do for the Scots? Mind you, what have decades of aimless managerialism done for us either?

Class certainly still exists in Scotland. The gap between rich and poor has widened in income, life expectancy and social mobility. And yet surveys suggest most Scots se

e themselves as part of Ed Miliband's squeezed middle - old class-based origins no longer define those who turn out to vote.

In fact, the nearest the Holyrood election has come to emotional, belief-based debate has been over wind farms. Last week's protracted rammy over the SNP's ambitious renewable energy targets is a good example.

Scotland currently exceeds its own demand for electricity, producing 125 per cent of what Scots need in an average year. By 2020 it's likely all sources of energy (nuclear, gas, coal, oil and renewables combined) could produce 170-200 per cent of Scotland's needs.

The SNP wants an amount equivalent to 100 per cent of demand to be produced by renewable means within that larger total of electricity supply.

Such an unequivocal statement of public support for renewable energy is vital to create investor confidence in a relatively new industrial sector. The SNP's target is achievable. But is it desirable?

Only in Scotland would such a gift horse have to endure a complete oral inspection. Because only in Scotland have we been brainwashed into thinking nature is safe in the hands of farmers and the landed classes, and endangered by any form of industrial development.

This country has been blessed with natural assets but cursed with a pattern of land ownership and restricted access to land and water. The result has been a distancing of Scots from nature.

We don't fish, hunt, use boats, build and own weekend huts or own land the way our Nordic neighbours do. We don't use nature, we tiptoe around in it. It's time for someone to ask why. British public policy since the war has encouraged a city-country divide. The 1947 Town and Country Planning Act confined all industrial development to cities to make sure farming recovered and food self- sufficiency was restored.

In fact, farming uses as many industrial processes as mining. But the template of a development-free countryside was created and the aesthetic of the "empty glens" adopted as default planning policy.

This, perhaps, is one of Britain's strongest remaining ideological, emotional and almost theological beliefs - that the "dark, satanic mills" of industry should never sully Britain's green and pleasant land. The emotional power of this mythical Victorian rural idyll has been constantly overlooked by Scotland's politicians and, as a result, the renewables revolution has been jeopardised.

Communities unable to control any aspect of their local lives or gain financial benefit from wind farms have opposed wind technology in the sacred name of nature. No wonder.

Scots know that Scotland needs a clever long-term shift of resources so that dependency is discouraged and self-management supported.

They want a fair, neutral hand on the tiller while that change occurs.

What's missing is not ideology - it's a series of long-overdue spending and policy shifts.

A shift away from retro-fitting skills on to broken teenagers and towards early years education.

A shift of resources away from hospitals to adapted homes for the elderly.

A shift in asset ownership away from landowners to communities.

And a shift in cash from baby-boomers to the benighted younger generation saddled with our debt.