Gerry Hassan: Modernisation seems distinctly old-fashioned

Modernisation is one of the defining words of our time, used by Tony Blair, David Cameron and Alex Salmond.

It is an in-word for those who feel they shape and define the age and the world. It has had an interesting trajectory; it was once bright, shiny, swaggering with confidence, impatient with opposition.

It became associated with Tony Blair and New Labour; modernisation was about “the project” and “the narrative”; it was against Old Labour, dinosaurs, vested interests, and “the forces of conservatism”.

Modernisation was, in Blair’s view, about optimism and embracing globalisation as a force of liberation. This was “an unstoppable force”, putting it to the 2005 Labour conference that people who wanted “to stop and debate globalisation” might as well “debate whether autumn should follow summer”.

New Labour’s reactionary politics might be obvious to most now, but it did for a period pre- and post-1997 ask new questions. There was an awareness that Labour had to change and understand aspiration, transform public services, look at the role of civil society and challenge the conservatism of trade unions.

Modernisation slowly became stuck in a time warp, detesting of the traditions of the Labour movement and trade unions. Modernisers railed against trade unions and public-sector workers, but as they marketised and outsourced, not one of the New Labour generation ever acknowledged the threat of corporate interests, from the likes of KPMG, PwC and McKinsey – the new insiders of the Blairite world.

New Labour’s modernisation became a caricature of anything progressive. It degenerated into an adoration of big business, accountancy and consultancy firms. The track record on this is conclusive: PFI/PPP, foundation hospitals, academy schools, and tuition fees. The entire logic of the Cameron administration on the public sector, and English NHS reform, free schools and the choice agenda is Blairite.

The electoral success of New Labour – and its domination the political agenda – fascinated opponents, in particular Cameron and Salmond.

Cameron’s fixation with Blair and New Labour is well documented, but Salmond’s is less examined. In his first stint as SNP leader he gave the party an unequivocal social democratic identity. Then, when the Penny for Scotland campaign, in the first Scottish Parliament election, was outmanoeuvred by Labour, it took on a less explicit tax-and-spend stance.

Modernisation for the SNP has meant the same “Big Tent” politics and way of seeing the world, and attempting to take that mantle from Scottish Labour. They could not be the cheerleaders of modernisation – in my fellow Scotsman columnist George Kerevan’s words – because of its unholy alliance of “conservative Scottish lawyers plus assorted ex-local government leaders linked to the quangocracy”.

The case for independence switched to economic and business grounds and tax competition. This is where the pre-credit crunch arc of prosperity vision emerged, joining Nordic social democracy with the Irish-style low business taxes.

The way public services are seen has become dominated by the Crawford Beveridge-Richard Kerley worldview of managerialism, challenging “entitlement culture” and charging for services. Social justice has become less and less explicit.

Modernisation may once have had its attractions but it has increasingly become the ethos of the new conservatism: of the world as it is seen from the City of London and corporate organisations.

SNP modernisation follows the same broad mix as New Labour: a language of progressivism, social democratic populism to keep the base happy and centre-left commentators, along with free market economics. And like New Labour there has been an embrace the Murdochs, Trumps and Goodwins of our day.

This has taken us, as academic Ben Jackson explores in a challenging piece in the journal Renewal on Salmond as a moderniser, to the current situation where the SNP presents independence as more continuity than change involving maintaining monetary union with the rest of the UK and retaining the Bank of England as Scotland’s lender of last resort.

Fascinatingly, Salmond (born 1954) is of the same generation as Tony Blair (1953) and Gordon Brown (1951), the three most successful post-Thatcherite politicians of their generation, and all born in Scotland. And yet they have all been defined by the retreats of the left in the 1980s, and the failure of modernisation.

Modernisation is a dead-end for progressives and the centre-left. It is not, as the late Philip Gould, architect of New Labour, claimed about the belief that “every voice had an equal worth, with an equal right to be heard”. Modernisation has become a narrow prism of the voices of the powerful, the quasi-businesses of today’s global giants and their apologists in public life.

Many years ago, I bought into the modernisation – but it hasn’t delivered. It has instead regressed into reactionary ideas. Its jargon of “evidence-based policy” and “what matters is what works” hasn’t created the bright new dawn it promised.

Modernisation was characterised by Blair’s hope and optimism, but it has produced change being done to us by powerful economic forces. It is one voters across the developed world increasingly don’t buy into, and when they have a say, as in France and Greece, reject.

Its has dominanated because political elites have bought into it along with the lack of a credible alternative. The challenge is to articulate a post-modernised politics without falling into the trap of old vested interests.

This is a terrain as yet unclaimed in Scotland. The appeal of the SNP has had a distinct moral dimension based on a revulsion at some actions of the British state and a sense we can do things better. Time for a new Scots communitarianism perhaps?