Wake up, Westminster. Scotland’s not getting back in its box
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Version 0 of 1. As the Scottish Green party conference closed on Sunday its membership passed 7,000. The event itself had been moved to a bigger hall and was still vastly oversubscribed. Before the referendum, Scotland had fewer than 2,000 signed-up Greens. But in the last four weeks, politics here has utterly changed. Next month will be the Radical Independence conference. When it took place last year, old organisers were blown away by the fact that it had managed to mobilise 1,000 people to discuss policies like a citizens’ basic income, renationalisation and the need for a renewable energy revolution. This year they’ve had to upgrade to a 3,000-seat auditorium. And then there’s the SNP, who can now claim about one in every 50 adult Scots as a signed-up member. Photographs doing the rounds on social media show local meetings with hundreds getting involved. Anyone who hoped that the radical fervour unleashed by the independence referendum would be crushed by defeat must be sorely disappointed: Scotland is refusing to get back in its box. The implications for the May elections are profound. Nicola Sturgeon may have been excluded from the TV debates, but she must now have an activist on pretty much every street in the country. Polls show the SNP going from six MPs to 23, even before that team has kicked into action. The Scottish Greens now have almost as many members as their English friends did when Caroline Lucas was first elected in Brighton Pavilion. Scots electing a delegation of anti-establishment activists will be a pounce of cats among our parliamentary pigeons, whatever happens. But it’ll be a different question if parliament is hung. And with Labour likely to lose seats to the SNP in an otherwise tight election, it might be Scotland that ushers Westminster to the gallows. As ever, though, it’s what’s happening in pubs, cafes, and city squares that our rulers really need to worry about. The activists inspired during the referendum saw an opportunity to take power back so that they could use it to build a fairer country. And in that process, as they brought the British state to its knees, they learned something vital – a lesson they’re unlikely to forget anytime soon: ultimately, people have more power than we’re allowed to believe. At the Scottish Green conference this weekend something else was clear. This flood of new activists still yearns for that fairer society. They are still willing to trudge the streets and mobilise their friends and stand up to the powerful to demand it. They have learned what it is like to think big and to believe that radical change is possible. And once people realise that their dreams can’t be contained in a 30-second TV ad, once they have tasted a smidgeon of their own power to win those dreams, they never go back. If it had been a yes vote this movement would now be focused on building a new country. Now, they have something standing in their way: Westminster. For a generation, the British state has asset-stripped the UK, allowing wages to stagnate as the elite become richer. They have handed our political decisions to corporate managers and the wealth of our collective work to gambling bankers. This plundering of our country relies on one simple thing: a passive population. In 1981, Margaret Thatcher declared her mission: “Economics are the method, the object is to change the soul.” We were taught to be consumers and shareholders, not citizens or voters or activists. And largely, it worked. Until now. In 2014, Scotland got its democratic soul back. People have remembered that it’s not by changing what we buy that we change the world, but through imagining and organising together. And, by joining political parties, mobilising social movements and building new media, that’s what thousands in Scotland are doing. We’ve been here before. In 1914, the then Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith said of Ireland, as he struggled to keep it in the UK, “I sometimes wish we could submerge the whole lot of them … under the waves of the Atlantic.” Westminster may soon come to regret its referendum victory: now, it’s going to have to try to govern the rebellious Scots. |