Brexit, Scotland and Labour

The Scottish Labour party are holding their annual conference in Perth this weekend. The party is clearly trying to find coherent ground from which to address the Scottish Independence question from which it can point out the difference between itself, the Conservatives and UKIP. Standing on the same platform as the Conservatives in the last referendum was a disaster. It accelerated the process of reorganising Scottish politics around a Tory-SNP axis and started a cascade that will very likely end in Labour losing Glasgow city council in the May elections, the last significant element of institutional power the party now controls.

The ground they are staking out is Federalism, which makes sense as Unionism and Separatism are both taken. The party inherits some serious intellectual capital from Gordon Brown on this issue. There are proposals for a Constitutional Convention and a new Act of Union that would reconstitute the UK. This opens up a vision that extends beyond Scotland and sows the seeds for a distinct Labour post-Brexit vision for Britain. By directing attention to the nations and regions of the UK it allows Blue Labour thinking on community to find some purchase in policy.

If you a democrat of any colour and have been waiting for Labour to begin to put together the plan for a post-Brexit opposition this has to be good news.  One can put aside the reasonable objection that the English regions have shown no appetite whatsoever for any kind of thoroughgoing federalism with the observation that you can't reframe a debate if you accept the current configuration of forces as given. That is obviously the parameter that Labour would have to change to make the rest of the post-Brexit revival of social democracy credible, though they might want to dust off their notes on "Home Rule all Around".

So it is depressing that it seems impossible to elaborate this vision coherently. If Sadiq Khan, mayor of London, cannot deliver a post-Nationalist message about identity and solidarity, without implying (very likely inadvertently) that separatists are racists, then it is difficult to see who can communicate the vision. Corbyn, with his usual deftness of touch, just falls back into UK majoritarianism. Dugdale, displaying lightning footwork, totally misses the point and manages to define the new idea completely in terms of opposition to the SNP, when the goal, from Labour's point of view, has to be to make the SNP irrelevant.

It may be that Labour is burdened with a more than usually ham-fisted group of leaders who lack the intellectual heft to see through a substantial reframing of political debate. Or it may be that they are trying to do the impossible. Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK have revived big-state nationalism. Teresa May, by quickly occupying UKIP's ground and holding her own has exported the post-Brexit crisis of identity to Labour (just as I suspect the Democratic alliance in the US will be put under huge strain by the Trump phenomenon). But you can't contest for nationalist votes with a vision of a complex politically and constitutionally differentiated country. That is clearly what integral nationalism rejects. So in Scotland Labour sounds like UKIP-lite, because of its majoritarian unionism, while in England it sounds confused about the fundamental issue of the make-up of the polity. It may be that even though the federalist option is internally coherent, there is simply no reasonable way to adapt it to the UK as we currently find it.

Moreover, in Scotland, the argument for complexity and differentiation of forms of power and identity is the separatist argument. Britain was articulated by Scots in the eighteenth century as an alternative project to English nationalism. The ideas about commercial society developed in the Scottish Enlightenment created categories (like "society") that reinterpreted the development of the unitary English state as the emergence of a complex Britain and so created the conditions for a union state rather than a nation state. English radicals, like Wilkes, disliked Scottish thinkers precisely because they muddied ideas about inclusion in the English political nation. Post-Brexit, the SNP, in terms of its ideas about solidarity and complexity, is the closest thing we have to an old-fashioned Scottish and British party.