By John Knox
Now that Alex Salmond’s government is under way and the excitement of the election campaign is behind us, it’s time for the losers to think again about their future.
Looking back on it, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives failed to offer two important things on 5 May: hope and defiance. The SNP, by contrast, offered both in abundance – hope that the spending cuts could be avoided and defiance that, if they did come from London, they would be fought on the beaches, in the fields and in the streets.
The Scots are in denial about the cuts, like the Irish, the Icelanders, the Greeks and the Spanish. And quite rightly. Why should ordinary people pay for the banking collapse? In answer to that, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems said, in effect, “Because you have to. The national debt is costing us all £120 million a day in interest and your mortgage payments will soar unless we bring that debt down."
Labour had a slightly less cruel answer: “We can pay off the debt more slowly, but we still need to go ahead with two-thirds of the cuts.”
Only the SNP offered the Scots the prospect of “growing” our way out of the recession and the debt crisis. Never mind that it may turn out to be a false prospectus. It depends on the performance of the private sector – which, so far, does not look encouraging.
The point is that people wanted to believe the SNP. They wanted their promises to be true… that they could stimulate the economy, keep public services going without compulsory redundancies, and still afford free higher education, free personal care, free bus travel for the over-60s, free prescriptions and no increases in the council tax for five years.
The election result was a refusal to accept the received wisdom of the elite that the crisis could only be overcome by the sacrifices of the ordinary citizen and the poor. The unions tried to suggest an alternative, that £120 billion a year could be raised in uncollected taxes. Others suggested we could go the American way and run an even larger government deficit until the recession is over. Still others suggested the banks should be left to collapse and their bonus culture could rot in hell with them.
Perhaps this was grasping at straws, but people wanted their government to find a better way out of the hole the bankers had dropped us into. It’s worth remembering at this point that the turnout in the election was only 51 per cent – so nearly half the population were puzzled as to what to do next, and/or they did not trust the politicians to be able to do anything about our predicament.
So Alex Salmond is left with the task of living up to that hope and that defiance. He may be able to turn those expectations into support for independence, we shall see. I think it more likely he will muddle through with the help of a pay cut in the public sector. But meanwhile, the opposition parties have to offer some hope of their own.
Labour have the choice of going back to the class war or marching on into the brave new world of New Labour, socialism for the middle classes. It means further public service reforms and cutting the welfare bill. The Scottish Conservatives have to hope the private sector will respond to the mighty challenge it has been posed – to invest in new manufacturing, energy production, public services etc and create a quarter of a million new jobs. Their social agenda depends entirely on this.
And, as for the Liberal Democrats, they have to do something really radical to avoid oblivion. The first thing they must do is pull of out the coalition, preferably in a row over bank bonuses. But they need to do much more than that. They need to re-interpret liberalism for the modern age. That is, they have to spell out what “decentralisation” means in a world of global economy and free information. And they have to redefine “individualism” when there are six billion people on the planet and finite natural resources. They need to go local and go green.
For instance, does decentralisation mean more power for local authorities or not? The Liberal Democrats were unsure about this during the election campaign. Does individualism mean that every citizen has the right to pollute the environment with their motor car if they want to, or live in a remote, traditionally Liberal Democrat constituency?
As the campaign unfolded, it became clear that none of the opposition parties had done this fundamental thinking. They were all about tactics – mimicking the SNP on council tax and the NHS, police numbers, class sizes, spending on green energy and various gimmicks for tackling alcohol abuse and crime. None of the differences were substantial. And none of the opposition parties was able to use those differences as illustrations of their overall message, as the SNP were for their message of hope.
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