Joyce McMillan: Big issues too much for politics

The other week, the endlessly entertaining Thinking Allowed programme on Radio 4 – chaired by veteran sociologist Laurie Taylor – offered up a discussion on responses to climate change, and how they often seem to reflect the psychoanalytic idea of “denial”; the suggestion that the more people are troubled by something, the harder they work – consciously or unconsciously – to pretend that it does not exist.

It goes without saying that it was not a discussion which pleased every listener; many objected to the assumption that man-made climate change is a fact to be denied, rather than a theory to be debated. Yet still, the conversation did address what now often seems to be the elephant in the room of political debate; the strong suggestion that if the global economy and society simply continue on their present track, then we may be heading for a cataclysmic combination of climate change and resource crisis, which could result in mass starvation, huge population movements, and a new age of frightening resource wars.

It is a truly terrifying prospect; the vast majority of climate scientists now believe that we are unlikely to avoid a global temperature increase of around 4-5 degrees by the end of century, triggering changes far beyond the range of anything that has taken place within the span of human history. And it’s already clear, after more than 20 years of failed UN climate negotiations, that our human institutions – competitive, slow-moving, and at global level barely functioning – are not capable of gaining consent for any solutions that would be likely to make much difference.

As for the predicted resource wars – well, it’s arguable that they are happening already, in disguised form. Low-lying countries across the developing world are suffering ever-higher levels of economic stress, as rising water deprives millions of homes and livelihoods; and although we are constantly invited to place a religious interpretation on the ever-escalating global conflict between the west and its allies on one hand, and “Islamic extremists” on the other – a conflict that now ranges across Afghanistan, Syria and North Africa, as well as Israel-Palestine – at the deepest level it simply represents a new face of old colonial resentments, and the fury of a generation of young men across the Arab and Muslim world who have been left without much hope of a secure and prosperous future, or of jobs to match their education.

So what do we do, in the face of all this? We seek distraction from the scale of the problem by turning our fire on the political structures around us, which we can change; and it therefore strikes me as no coincidence that at this moment of colossal global challenge, the UK finds itself locked into the process of not one, but two, constitutional referendums, which seem likely to absorb almost all the political energy of our governing class for the next half-decade.

The Scottish constitutional debate is, of course already full of well-established tensions between the kind of escapist nationalism which assumes that everything will just naturally be better, when Scots run their own affairs, and the more pragmatic nationalism which argues that under current global conditions, people living in Scotland have a better chance of dealing with the various crises we face, and of making a creative and positive contribution to the international response, if we shake ourselves free of the sclerotic structures of the British state.

Both the First Minister Alex Salmond, and his deputy Nicola Sturgeon, project themselves strongly as belonging to this pragmatic school of thought; so that in this week’s inaugural lecture to the Jimmy Reid Foundation, the First Minister based his argument entirely on the hope that an independent Scotland – with a more sustainable 21st century economy – would be better placed than the UK to offer the kind of social justice and equality of opportunity that Reid championed all his life.

And now, following David Cameron’s announcement last week, we face a five-year UK debate on Britain’s European Union membership which will no doubt display exactly the same tensions between practical argument on one hand, and nationalistic dream-politics on the other.

On the surface, there will be robust business arguments about whether Britain would do better without EU “red tape” – the right-wing phrase, it seems, for basic employment rights – or would do worse without automatic access to the single market.

In the background, though, both David Cameron and Ed Milliband will be able to hear the baying backbeat of Daily-Express-style nationalism, the urge to stop this modern world of international co-operation and compromise because we want to get off, to tell Johnny Foreigner to get lost, and to retreat into dreams of the sceptred isle that once ruled the waves.

And meanwhile, out there where ordinary people struggle to pay their energy bills and to meet ever-rising food costs, the big questions of our age – about the global economic system we have developed, about its growing failure to distribute wealth and opportunity, about the pressures it brings to bear on governments, and about the failure of governments to combine to resist those pressures – are likely to remain unanswered, while politicians haggle over the distribution of powers between political structures that are already largely impotent.

I’m not suggesting, of course, that constitutional change can never be constructive, and is always irrelevant. I am glad that the Scottish Parliament exists today, proud to have been involved in the campaign for it; and my own political journey has taken me to a point where I find it so hard to detect any real signs of life in UK centre-left politics that continuing within the Union seems a frighteningly barren prospect.

Yet constitutional debate is always at its best when it puts itself at the service not of identity politics, but of democracy; when it focusses not on one nation and its myths, but of those wider hopes and values that, at street level, truly unite the human race – the hope of a living in a society that is both just and free, that offers security and the sense of a viable future, and that cares enough to empower its citizens to love, invent and create, rather than merely inciting us to hate, to conquer, and to destroy.