Boldness is needed to challenge the far right and deliver independence
Speymouth
We need to brace ourselves for the very real and alarming prospect that the frothing über-yoons of Reform UK come in second in next week’s Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse Holyrood by-election. I dislike the pejorative term yoon as a rule, but in the case of Reform UK it’s fully warranted. It’s less likely, but not beyond the bounds of possibility, that Reform could even win. Let’s hope that doesn’t happen but in either case we can no longer complacently tell ourselves here in Scotland that we are somehow immune to the rise of the far-right.
The far right is on the march globally, First Minister John Swinney’s recent anti-far right summit may have been well intentioned but it was always doomed to failure, the rise of the far right is being driven by factors far beyond the powers of a shackled and limited devolved Scottish parliament. Globally, people are struggling to make a living and afford decent housing as a small minority of super rich grow ever more wealthy. People feel, quite correctly, that the system is not working for them, and that the economy is rigged against them as it operates as a mechanism for funnelling money to the rich and keeping it there.
Even if you do have a job and a home, everything around you seems to be turning to shit as public services creak under the strain of chronic underinvestment and the profiteering of the private sector forces us to pay more and more for less and less. Even the Internet, once the great hope of a better future, is becoming less usable as Google searches produce ever less reliable results, Twitter and Facebook are turning into more chaotic versions of a Nürnberg rally stuffed full of racism, hatred, and conspiracy theories touted by people who have ‘done their own research’, research which consists of watching Internet videos produced by some imbecile whose only talent lies in parting people from their money. It’s only in this milieu that someone like Jordan Peterson, the moron’s idea of an intellectual, can pass himself off as a great thinker, and the brain dead Candace Owens – who announced last week that science is a pagan religion which she has rejected – can pose as an ‘influencer’.
Meanwhile your income doesn’t keep up with inflation, and people feel as though voting doesn’t matter anymore because when we elect someone who promised change that change turned out to be much the same crap that we had before and for whom the idea of fixing the systemic problems facing us all isn’t even on the radar. Starmer witters on about ‘growth’ as if economic growth were the magic bullet which will solve all problems but without radical changes to the tax and benefits system, changes which Starmer won’t countenance, economic growth will only put more wealth in the bank accounts of the rich, and that’s where it will stay.
The era of centrist politics is dead. Funded and promoted by the super-rich, the far right floods the media sphere, both traditional and social, offering a deceptively simple solution to society’s problems. By dint of outnumbering and outshouting and out-funding in the media, the far right lies more effectively than progressives tell the truth. The far right tells us that the reason you can’t get a decent job or are priced out of the housing market is due to migrants and the imaginary ‘woke elites’. Just put the blame on Muslims, brown and black people, trans and gay people. The far right will take care of those others and we will all magically be transported back to the good old days of the 1950s when you could get on a bus without fear of over overhearing a conversation in a foreign language or encountering an obviously queer individual. The good old days when housing was affordable and a job was for life. But as any science nerd -rather science pagan priest, pace Candace Owens – will tell you, correlation is not causation.
The truth is of course that the far right has no solution to wealth inequality, it has no answer for job insecurity or the housing crisis, how can it when its main economic policy is to cut taxes for the rich and axe the regulations which ensure we have a decent environment and working conditions? The far right will do this while presiding over massive corruption of the sort which has seen Donald Trump blatantly sell access and enrich himself by $2.8 billion, more than doubling his fortune from $2.3 billion to $5.1 billion according to Forbes magazine. Public disappointment and anger in a Reform UK government will dwarf that we have seen with Keir Starmer, but by that time it will be too late. Once they take power, authoritarians do not surrender it easily.
The era of centrist politics is dead. Traditional political parties can respond to the rise of the right in one of two ways. Firstly they can do as Starmer is doing and turn what was once a centre-left political party with a strong socialist tradition into a pale imitation of the far right, promising to crack down on benefits and implement mass deportations, but all that achieves is to normalise and legitimise the messaging of the far right, further entrenching them in the body politic. As Labour’s plummeting polling numbers prove, it is also spectacularly ineffective.
Alternatively a party can tack left, making tackling wealth inequality the core of its offer to the electorate. Reforming the system of political funding to prevent rich individuals effectively buying political parties through large donations, legislating to ensure transparency in the funding of think tanks and introducing a new system of media regulation, breaking up the social media giants and ensuring that the media is politically representative of the population it purports to serve. Norway’s medias funding system is one possible model. It’s only by offering a real alternative to the tired nostrums of the failed centre that we can hope to defeat the far right. Recent elections in Europe show that this can resonate with the public.
Eagle eyed readers will note that none of this is possible within the constrained powers of a devolved Scottish Parliament. We can only hope to achieve it with Scottish independence, and just as a party must be bold enough to offer a true radical left alternative which can cut through the apathy and false equivalence of “they’re all as bad as one another” which only benefits the far right, so a pro-independence party must be bold enough to challenge and defy a Westminster which refuses to respect the democratic will of the Scottish electorate.
When faced with an existential crisis such as that posed by actual fascism, it is not a time for timidity or playing it safe. Now is the time for boldness. Now is the time to put the super-rich and their far right puppets back in their box. Offer people a real alternative and they will vote for it.
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