From September 2014 to May 2015: Does the SNP become the Irish Home Rule Party?

The referendum campaign in Scotland was one of the most interesting political processes I have ever been involved with, but it is over. I had assumed that once it had finished there would be a fairly speedy return to some sort of political normality, crisis-ridden adaptation to an increasingly unstable world, but that seems to be normality these days. Instead David Cameron's speech at the very moment the "no" victory was announced has moved the constitutional question up to the level of the UK. There is is a lot to be said about this, much of it derived from the debates on the nature of governance in the modern world thrown up in the independence debate itself. Alex Bell's thoughts and Gordon Brown's book aren't bad places to start thinking about these issues and Peter Arnott's analysis of the politics of the moment  is petty sharp.

I want to think about something much more specific and practical: the election next May. That is the next point at which the elements that will have to address the constitution of Britain (in its broadest sense, cultural and social as well as political) will be resorted. Given the current state of polls Labour may win an absolute majority, but I would be surprised if they did. The key indicator (in the polls) of economic competence is against them and that indicates that there will be a swing to the Tories as the date approaches. However there seems to be next to no possibility of a Tory majority, beset as they are by UKIP and by an electoral map tilted against them.

Another factor that has not, as yet, been recognized, is the possibility of the SNP winning a lot of seats in the coming election. They currently hold six but if, and this is a big if, the "Yes" vote on Clydeside translates into an increased turn-out and a change in the pattern of voting SNP in Holyrood elections and Labour in Westminster elections, they could end up holding the balance of power in the UK come next summer.

This would actually be a terrible outcome for the SNP as they would be under extreme pressure either to support a minority Labour Government or to go into coalition with it. They would become implicated in managing the slow decline of the British social democratic compromise and in whatever constitutional settlement that Labour will favor. Their capacity to represent the forces looking for a democratic renewal across the whole of Britain and NI, not just Scotland, would be eliminated and they would become a regional party speaking to a special interest, the semi-detached wing of the Scottish Labour Party.

This was exactly the crux that the old Irish Home Rule party found itself in and it never satisfactorily solved it. Their tactical alliance with the Liberals made sense, and allowed the party to be part of a coalition interested in reform of the state, but the relationship with the Liberals caused such tension in the party that after the fall of Parnell the party lost most of its efficacy and its capacity to lead the country politically.

My suggestion, given that this is not an unlikely outcome, is that the SNP should state in their manifesto that they will not enter any coalition, support a minority government, or take UK wide office. There is no need to go to the extreme of boycotting parliament or refusing to vote on a case by case basis. Members have to represent their constituents. They have to insist that Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats solve the problem of democratic reform of the UK. The SNP's proposed solution is disaggregation of the Union, their analysis is that it cannot be reformed. They have to act like they mean what they say, and not be tempted to use a tactical advantage, even to secure concessions to Scotland.

And someone should put a copy of Paul Bew's biography of Parnell in Nicola Sturgeon's hands.

Federalism, Scotland and Gordon Brown

There are now two pro-union campaigns being conducted in Scotland and they seem to be hostile to one another. The thrust of the main "Better Together" campaign for the closing stretch is emerging. The best hope they have is to maintain the sizable gender gap in favor of the union. The analysis seems to be that women in Scotland are more averse to the risk involved in independence and dislike the conflict involved in the debate. To that end there will continue to be a series of stories about nationalists as thugs, the assertion that everyone who is pro-independence is a nationalist, with the intimation, never stated, that nationalists are Nazis. This line is calculated to disenchant female voters from voting for independence. As it seems, though evidence on this is mixed, that the don't knows are breaking pro I'd expect to see efforts made to keep as much confusion in play as possible and a fairly sizable voter suppression effort. This is incredibly risky as it doubles down on the negative strategy and, more importantly, risks winning the vote without winning the argument. A slim pro-union vote on this basis would be a disaster for all sorts of obvious reasons.

The other campaign is Gordon Brown. Brown is trying to turn the independence debate into a wider conversation about governance in the British Isles, he is actually trying to win the argument. He has a book out next week, but the central contention has already been trailed in various  newspaper pieces. His argument is that the union has been the context for managing the risk involved in modern society and for solidarity in the face of financial disaster and poverty. It is the best version of the unionist argument, that the union offers a kind of universalism that transcends particular identities. This is not a defence of the political status quo and he is effectively in favor of completing Gladstone's project of home rule all around; federalizing the union. So this is a serious response to the dynamics that are the condition of the independence issue, not an attempt to win 51% of the vote.

I admire Gordon Brown and I've long thought that if he, rather than Blair, had been guiding the New Labour project then it would have been what was needed, a social democratic response to the changes  brought by Thatcherism, rather than a capitulation to them. But I fear that Brown is going to find himself a in a similar place on the independence issue. As Colin Kidd pointed out in his Guardian piece Brown has been trying to get reform of the union and democratization of the state taken seriously for the last twenty years, but without success. If his thinking about the complex relationships within the British Isles had real purchase on unionism then it would be flourishing. However the majority of the people who think like Gordon Brown on these issues are now in the pro-independence camp. They, we, think that the kind of progressive cosmopolitanism he endorses is best pursued through and by an independent Scotland. We have been here before. The Gladstonian project for reform of the union failed too.

Red and Orange

One of the continuing puzzles of the Scottish independence debate is the weak performance of the Better Together campaign. Much is made of the failure to make a "positive" case for the Union, but the case for the Union is obvious. The union offers a hedge against a series of risks, financial, military, economic and cultural. I suspect that what is meant when people complain about negativity is the complete absence of any shared project for the union. We know what it is for, in the sense of its function, but what does it do, what does it propose? There are all sorts of projects for an independent Scotland, and the utopianism that is very often decried by Unionists is, I suspect, the real advantage held by those in favour of independence.

Just why there seems to be no project for the Union among Scottish unionists isn't hard to understand. The Conservative and Unionist party cannot lead the campaign for the union in Scotland for the obvious reason, so it is left to the Labour party. However the Labour party is not a unionist party. It has all sorts of federalist and home rule roots (not as many as the Liberals) and is fully aware that the greatest electoral threat to working and lower-middle class support for the party has been unionism. You can be red or you can be orange but it is very hard to put those two identities together. In the unlikely event that Alistair Darling were to wrap himself in the Union Jack, plead with his fellow Scots to remember their loyalty to the Queen and remind them of their shared majority Protestant faith and commitment to liberty, he would actually be a Tory, a liberal unionist Tory, but a Tory nevertheless. So for obvious, structural reasons the Better Together campaign can't make a positive unionist case.

This would never have happened when Donald Dewar was around. The trap for Labour in Scotland was set when the Edinburgh Agreement excluded the "Devo Max" option from the referendum. This was initially seen as a bit of clever manoeuvring by Cameron as he forced Salmond to argue for an option that had only roughly 30% support at the time. At that point it looked like the independence issue might be taken off the table for a generation by way of a heavy defeat. However the real losers here were Labour since Devo Max was their natural equilibrium point so they ended up with the options of either supporting the Scottish Nationalist position or the Tory line, they had no option that they owned. I can't imagine Dewar, or Labour circa 1999 that still had serious Scottish representation around the leadership, would have allowed a question go the Scottish people that did not have a clearly Labour-branded option on it. So now, as the polls tighten enough to make it impossible to be semi-involved, Labour is driven to do the Tories' work for them in Scotland, and pretty much on their terms. This can get really odd and drive otherwise sensible people to say really daft things. I don't really believe George Robertson thinks that Western civilisation will collapse if Scotland votes for independence or that Alistair Darling really thinks there is any resemblance between Alex Salmond and Kim Jong-Il. These are the kinds of exaggerated statements people make when they are uncomfortable about their own positions.

Global History

We held the second of our workshops on the definition of global history on March 21st and 22nd in Dundee. The first, last June, was on finance, and this one was on communication. When we were setting these up I thought what would emerge would be a set of objects and categories that had a "global", that is to say universal, history. This expectation has not been fulfilled and a much more unexpected, and to my mind interesting, set of ideas about global history has begun to crystallize for me from our discussions.

The version of global history that seems to me to be emerging is characterized by a benign tension between two poles. The first is an insistence that a global history can't simply be a general history. This disposition is skeptical about every particular instance of global history, because it is suspicious of abstraction away from experience. However it insists that global context is absolutely necessary for the understanding of phenomena like democracy, empire or capitalism. Underlying this move is a kind of neo-transcendental argument (most explicitly deployed by Andrew Sartori in his version of global intellectual history). This asserts that since global phenomena (like the state or science) exist then there must be conditions of globality which have been and are being fulfilled. This kind of argument, that avoids prematurely defining the empirical conditions of globality, seems much more promising than defining global history in terms of trade, empire or any other phenomenon.

The second pole follows on form work done in the last decade by Anthony Hopkins and Patrick O'Brien. This is an insistence that global history is local history. The point of global history is not to identify structures with world-spanning effect. In some ways that would be too easy. The point is to convincingly argue why global context counts in particular places for particular reasons. Global is not some teleology toward which societies develop; it is more like a technique or a repertoire that a society can mobilize (with more or less success). Sophus Reinert's work on emulation is a really powerful example of how a specific text translated into a variety of contexts to very different ends. The really tough work to be done will be to explain how globally significant ideas and contexts generate radically different outcomes in different contexts. Difference, rather than identity, seems to be the them of the work that we will be doing.