Joyce McMillan: Scotland will never accept the values of the stockbroker belt

Published on Friday 25 June 2010 22:05

WELL, we have been here before; indeed, to those of us who were alive and sentient in the 1980s, this is beginning to feel like Groundhog Day.

It's not so much the firm smack of cost-cutting government that induces this feeling of dj vu; any government elected in the UK this year would have had to cut hard.

No, the thing that triggers the memories, and sets off the Pavlovian reflexes of rage and fear, is the triumphalist language that surrounds the cuts: that old, familiar psychological trope once aptly described as "sado-monetarism". In this frame of reference, toughness is presented as "good", and compassion as a fatal weakness. The harder the government gets – in slashing spending and turning a deaf ear to the protests of those who suffer – the more it is admired and lionised; and the more contempt is poured on the heads of those "feeble" and "cowardly" opponents who take a less ruthless view.

Now it doesn't, of course, take much polticial wisdom to grasp that these moments of triumphant sado-monetarism have a limited political life. Essentially, if huge deficits and out-of-control spending make societies economically unsustainable, then the macho cult of the cut tends, over time, to make them morally unsustainable. And there is every sign that, at the level of politics and language, our leaders fully understand that truth. Like the incoming Blair government back in 1997, the new coalition wants to portray itself as "firm but fair"; determined to cut wasteful spending, but also determined to protect the weakest and most vulnerable, and even to reduce inequality.

The problem, though – for New Labour in the good times, and now for the Lib-Cons in bad times – is that they lack the new post-Thatcherite ideology to match their rhetoric. So George Osborne stands up in the Commons and trumpets his "progressive" Budget; but then proceeds to unveil a package based on two profoundly reactionary presumptions, which render it structurally incapable of doing anything except clobbering the vulnerable and leaving the comfortable relatively untouched. In the first place, he concludes that the deficit should be dealt with by cutting expenditure and raising taxes, in a proportion of 77 per cent to 23 per cent; and in the second, he loads his tax increases, such as they are, on to a broadly regressive purchase tax (VAT), rather than income tax. And these decisions wipe out, at a stroke, any positive impact of the small reliefs he provides at the low end of the income scale.

There is no point, to put it simply, in adding 2 a week to the pension of an frail old lady who has just – thanks to massive spending cuts – lost vital home help services that would cost her 50 a week to replace.

So here we are, trapped as we have been for the past 35 years in this deadlock between the economically unviable and the morally repellent. If we want to break free, we could perhaps do worse than to look again at Scotland, a nation which famously demonstrates an apparently unshakeable aversion to the cult of cuts that, every so often, grips Westminster government. Tories, of course, like to chastise the Scots for this lack of enterprise and dependency on the state, as if our only redemption must lie in culturally assimilating ourselves to the values of the Surrey stockbroker belt and adopting the view that the "public sector" is some kind of giant parasite, draining the wealth of the nation.

The truth is, though, that, temperamentally and culturally, Scotland will never accept that view and is right not to do so. Scotland is only two generations away from the nation that traditionally revered those three pillars of the community: the dominie or headteacher, the doctor and the minister; and a nation founded on that basic respect for learning and public service will never adopt the mercantile vision of public employees as a bunch of leeches pilfering the taxpayers' money.

So long as the advocates of the free market continue to embrace a brand of capitalism that sets itself up in hostile opposition to professional public service, in other words, Scotland as a nation will not be won over to its cause.

What we need is a new model of enterprise that meshes more closely with the reality of a modern mixed economy, and a new model of government which matches it.

As we have all had reason to remember over the past two years, there were once models of private enterprise, including commercial banking, which combined high levels of commercial success with equally high levels of social responsibility and civic engagement. These are models which have been trashed and scorned by the global turbo-capitalists of the last generation; people who have taken an honourable, law-abiding tradition of wealth generation and sought to transform it into a global system of exploitation that believes it can suborn any elected government, have laws changed to suit itself and crush in its path any protest by the "little people" of the Earth.

That is not a model of capitalism that decent Conservatives should be defending, and it is not a model which should be allowed to dictate the deficit-cutting strategy of an elected government. Here in Scotland, if we choose to exercise them, we have the historic, the cultural and the intellectual resources to challenge that model, to propose an alternative, and – now that old Labour's Scottish political hegemony has been broken – to reform, sharpen and strengthen our public sector as well.

And the day when Scotland's Tories stop defending the worst excesses of the neoliberal era and start to embrace new models of enterprise fit for the 21st century will be the day when large numbers of Scots will begin to think of voting Conservative again – provided, of course, they don't leave it too long, under the cosh of a creed they should never have embraced, and which they still have time to reject, for good.