Happy to be an embarrassment
Common Weal has been regularly mocked for making arguments which are now mainstream. It is a reflection of Scotland’s stultifying problem of political orthodoxy and the failure to support and promote voices brave enough to ask difficult questions.
When I got my first house I had more wall space than things to fill it. So I got some poems and literary extracts printed in large format and I stuck them only mounting boards. There was one I would see every morning when I woke up and it became my favourite. It is from Nietzsche:
“Just as the clouds tell us the direction of the wind high above our heads, so the lightest and freest spirits are in their tendencies foretellers of the weather that is coming. The wind in the valley and the opinions of the marketplace of today indicate nothing of that which is coming but only of that which has been.”
Well I'll tell you what; Scotland hates the lightest and freest spirits. It positively detests them. It is barely up to checking the wind in the valley. Scotland struggles to see the past never mind the future. And it is doing us enormous harm.
Unless we can find a way to listen to voices which do not trot out orthodoxy unrelated to reality or the world in which we actually exist we will keep being surprised by the future. And if the future keeps surprising us we will make a mess of it.
What prompted me to think this was a number of things that cropped up across the media this week. The media is now awash with people arguing that we must reduce our reliance on US software platforms and technology. There is also no shortage of commentary on banning social media for teenagers.
The breakdown of the Western security alliance has endless people gnashing their teeth and calling for Europe to act. There is increasing awareness of global food supply chains which Covid showed us were fragile in a volatile world. And who isn't now saying that breaking the social contract has undermined faith in democracy?
Plus in Scotland people are beginning to wake up to the tyranny of the quango classes who rule the country in unaccountable ways, and there is finally debate about overseas ownership of our economy and our assets.
Here's the thing; Common Weal has been warning about all of these things for a very long time. In fact we have been mocked as 'not serious' because we said these things. We were told that turning our back on US tech was luddite, that ownership doesn't matter if the profits are coming in, that social media is a force for good and asking kids to give up is unrealistic.
Someone actually laughed at me when I said in 2018 that global food systems were fragile and the UK particularly vulnerable. We've been warning for ages that you can't just keep increasing tax and reducing service levels without democratic harm but the 'serious' people just kept saying 'no, more cuts'.
The more we've warned that politicians don't run Scotland, bureaucrats do (often not very well), the more the bureaucrats have been protected and empowered. And it is only three years since we were being called 'useful idiots' for questioning the stability of Western security arrangements.
I don't know how else to put this; we told them so and they didn't listen and now we're here. The radical out-there-ness with which we were treated has morphed into everyone pretending they always thought the thing we were mocked for thinking.
No, it doesn't mean we get everything right all the time. For example, I thought city centre commercial property prices would have fallen precipitously by now given homeworking and online shopping. We proposed a whole bunch of responses. Instead prices seem to have been sustained by the shift to 'student housing' in commercial property markets.
So why were we able to see things others didn't? Well, for that it is worth turning to an unusual source – Dominic Cummings. I can't find the reference but he wrote something like 'if you give a politician the option to lose in a business suit or have a chance of winning by putting on a monkey costume, the politician will chose to lose'.
I have seen this in real life in real time. Politicians trade on 'credibility' and if they feel they are straying from perceived orthodoxy, they get really nervous. Politicians virtually never lead change, they follow it. So if the orthodoxy isn't changing, more often than not the politician isn't leading.
Which opens the question of from whence the orthodoxy came? This is easy to answer; from early cities to the medieval church to modern neoliberalism, orthodoxy is set by whoever has most social power, and it is always set in its own interests. Just as the priests created orthodoxy in the interests of the church, so lobbyists now create orthodoxy in the interests of corporations.
It is them who have been saying US IT platforms are good (they're not, they're just good at exploiting us). It is them who tell you that the answer to military threat is the military hardware their companies make. It is them who persuade you that selling all your national assets cheap is a good idea. They are the ones who want to control the food system and tell you it is all fine when it isn't.
“You can free a nation from cowardice and equip it to respond rapidly to the future, but you yourself must scrape together some courage”
This is where the Nietzsche quote comes in; it's not that he's proposing that there is ever going to be a world without powerful people trying to impose an orthodoxy that suits them, it's that he suggests that if you look above that orthodoxy there are some people who are less bound by it who can rise higher and see further. He is suggesting we listen to them sometimes.
They have a characteristic; they don't trade in reputation or 'credibility'. After all, if credibility is your goal then the best thing to do is listen to whatever the most powerful person in the room is saying and agree. You have to not care, at least a little bit, before you can say what others are nervous about saying.
So who are these people? I know you're thinking 'well, he's going to say think tanks', but I most certainly am not. Think tanks are not what you think they are. They were not created by the policy community but by the PR community. Think tanks were invented specifically to launder ideas on behalf of power. That was their original purpose.
It also explains why you often get useful data in think tank reports but you may find yourself underwhelmed by the conclusions. Their funders do not like 'risky shit'. And that is replicated ten-fold in modern academia. Ever since a system of rating research was created, social research has converged more and more on a safe consensus, the sort of thing that gets you good scores (and so money) and doesn't rock the boat.
Academia is no longer a good way to see further distances (it used to be, but not now, not in the social sciences). Then there were 'writers' – from philosophers to pamphleteers to oddball hobbyists who just did things because they were interested. Leonardo Da Vinci didn't design helicopters to make him money or gain anyone's respect...
But who publishes oddballs any more? Worse still, there is no filtering of oddballs. In the modern world Leonardo Da Vince would be thinking big thoughts on a Substack channel, struggling to be noticed over the top of anti-vaxers (because who is interested in helicopters when you can get furious about Anthony Fauci).
The other source of free spirits was the arts, but they are in their own credibility-seeking doom loop. What is the balance of art which is challenging our society versus the art which is calibrated to deliver the safe, bland identity-based narratives of the last decade?
I can barely think of a moment when I've felt kicked up the arse by art since Renton stood at the bottom of that hill and did his “colonised by wankers” speech. Surely Scotland has never been in such need of a kick up the arse – so who is administering it?
The problem with all of this, top to bottom, is largely the same thing – our politics is failing. It is getting safer and safer, retreating further and further into caution, relying more and more on orthodoxy, ceding power and responsibility to corporations and a ruling elite because challenging them is harder.
It is why our universities are run by people who think they should take massive financial risks investing in overseas student recruitment but that academic research should never be risky. It's why arts funding is directed by people who wet themselves if you say 'political' or 'constitutional question' or 'challenge the powerful'.
It is why the media is left to do whatever it's right-wing bias wants to do without intervention. Best not act, best not even see this as a problem. It's why politicians never stand up and say that lobbyists are chancers who should routinely be ignored because 'they would say that, wouldn't they?'. It's why they refuse to listen to Common Weal.
To put it more simply, if you govern cautiously you create a cautious environment. If every appointment is 'the obvious person' then there is no room for free spirits. If every funding decision is 'de-risked' you just keep funding the same things forever and nothing changes. If every budget is to keep lobbyists happy you only entrench lobbying. And then you're stuck with a system incapable of seeing beyond yesterday.
The corrective to this is crisis, the moment when orthodoxies fall apart. The heartbreaking thing is that if you need a crisis to make you believe that the future is real and may not be the same as the pat it is too late, you are in a crisis you didn't prepare for.
You can free a nation from cowardice and equip it to respond rapidly to the future, but you yourself must scrape together some courage. That is courage that Scotland's governing classes would run a mile from. They are just the wind in the valley, obsessed with the opinions of the marketplace of today, always living in the past.
Hell mend them. Common Weal refuses to comply. We won't pretend there isn't a future, only an ever-present past. We'll just keep embarrassing ourselves by trying to be right, not safe. And if the outcome is calling things as correctly and as often as we have, we'll be entirely comfortable with it.