When the public has lost faith in you, don’t blame the public

Yesterday the First Minister hosted a summit to 'stop the rise of the far right'. This produced many more questions than answers, and certainly an awful lot more rhetoric than identifiable action.

Perhaps the first question is 'where does the far right begin and is it legitimate to use public funding to suppress it?'. Clearly there was outrage in the independence movement when active suppression was cited as the goal of UK government towards the politics of independence. It would be considered wrong if this had been a summit to 'defeat environmental politics'.

So is Reform of a different order of politics and is it legitimate to seek to prevent its rise? And, if so, why are half of the political parties that attended the summit aping Reform policies? In fact most of them are at the very least drifting in Reform's direction at the moment. Might not a starting point be to repudiate hard right politics by advocating for their opposite?

The next big question has to be 'so what?'. Apart from collectively signing a surprisingly weak joint statement and what sound like a lot of platitudes, no commentators or those reporting on the event seem able to derive any substance from it, no clear action points or even consistent and compelling analysis.

It would appear that the big twin concerns identified by participants were 'inequality' and 'misinformation'. The actual conduct of those at the top of politics and governance in Scotland does not seem to have come in for a lot of discussion so it doesn't seem there was a lot of self-reflection involved.

Inequality and misinformation are two big social issues that politicians tend to believe are entirely someone else's fault. Inequality 'just is', some kind of inevitable feature of our economic system. Misinformation passes responsibility to 'bad actors', malign and shadowy figures who are corrupting our otherwise admirable society.

The partiality of this view is the problem. Common Weal exists primarily to promote the benefits of policy based on reducing inequality, increasing collective equity in society and building shared interest through strong public service and infrastructure. We have warned again and again and again that government policy in Scotland is contributing to inequality.

Yet the Scottish Government persists nonetheless. For a government who introduced low-tax, low-regulation Freeports and a PFI scheme that helps rich landowners siphon off money designated for a just transition though a poorly-regulated tree-planting scheme then to blame others for inequality is part of the problem, not the solution.

It is also difficult for many in the public to hear that the problem is 'other people's misinformation' when they can see a group of politicians and public leaders whose own track record of accountability, transparency and honesty has left much to be desired. Does setting climate change targets you have no plan for meeting, winning an election on them and then dropping them not count as misinformation?

The solution to the 'rise of the far right' or whichever symptom of the failure of contemporary society and politics you want to pick (a mental health epidemic, poor treatment at work, NHS waiting times, crime and community breakdown) is not for the people who sat at the top during the era when it emerged to meet in gilded rooms and blame everyone else.

They are right about economic inequality being the primary underlying issue. It is, as has been shown over and over, most notably in the groundbreaking work The Spirit Level. It is wrong to suggest their actions are not making it worse. The Scottish Government has a 'poverty strategy', but no strategy for reducing inequality. It has not mentioned reducing inequality as a goal of government for a long time.

But they are wrong not to look at the collapse in confidence in public institutions in Scotland, very much including the Scottish Government. It might have been helpful to commission someone to do a thorough study of how the public really see Scotland's institutions and leaders. The chances are that repeated stories of high salaries, gross failures and then impunity and lack of accountability are a problem.

Put very simply, it would probably show that for a lot of people a major problem is that those they have entrusted to look after their tax revenue, run their public services and build their public infrastructure really do give the impression of being in it for themselves, constantly looking for ways to increase their own wealth (see WICS executive junkets), refusing to be responsive to public and stakeholder concerns (CalMac having no representative of island or coastal communities in its governance) and perpetually insulating themselves from consequences for failure (see SQA and Education Scotland).

A genuinely radical economic policy that tackles inequality is a realistic solution. A major package of democratic reform that strips away the unaccountable privilege of senior public sector workers would probably also have a positive effect. Scotland's leaders have resisted both of these steps at every turn. Was anything learned yesterday?