The real purpose of Scottish detention centres

To understand why Reform is threatening to build migrant detention centres in Scotland, it helps to understand a mode of thinking that has emerged in Western democracies and how the right has fuelled and promoted it. It can be thought of as '...at least punish my enemies'.

Two phenomena have emerged at once in Western democracy. On the one hand, we have the increasing ineffectiveness of the Western means of government. The practices which are captured in the idea of New Public Management represented a revolution in how government was done, and about 30 years later, it has stopped working.

Because politicians have been using the same limited number of policy levers to achieve the same comparatively limited range of political objectives, they are all getting similar results. And because the Western economic model isn't delivering the nature of economic growth that New Public Management was designed to manage, the results they are getting are largely failures.

Meanwhile, largely because of social media and our new information environment, but also because of the nature of our print media and because of public frustration that society is not delivering for them, we are seeing increasing amounts of political polarisation.

What the global right has understood is that if you can't deliver for people through managing the levers of power, you can at least make them feel like you are delivering for them via reinforcing their negative perceptions of polarisation. Put crudely, if you can’t do anything positive for your own people, you can at least do bad things to their enemies.

We can see this in the US just now. Donald Trump has personal approval ratings which are higher than his approval ratings on any individual policy area – his voters support him more than they support anything he does on key policy. What he has done successfully is give voice to criticism of groups his voters view as being their 'enemies'.

In the US, this largely means the 'college-educated liberal elite' which Trump has regularly attacked through his actions against universities, liberal arts institutions, legal firms and so on. None of this has any positive impact on a non-college-educated white man from a low-income household, but it feels like it does.

That is precisely what Nigel Farage is doing with his threat to build asylum detention centres in the constituencies of his opponents. He is signalling that he will punish the enemies of his voters if he is elected, a simple atavistic tribal move designed to motivate voters shortly before an election.

In the US, this behaviour is known among its practitioners as 'owning the libs'. It is explicitly about riling up liberals and keeping them fuming, not least because proponents believe it causes liberals to overemphasise precisely the moralising behaviour that alienates conservative voters in the first place.

But there are two big lessons about 'punish my enemies' strategies, and we are seeing both in the US just now. First of all, they also have the effectiveness of galvanising your opponents and pushing them to coordinate and act. But more fundamentally, in the end, punishing other people doesn't improve your life. You can be distracted through 'the theatre of cruelty', but not forever.

Nigel Farage is threatening to build detention centres in Scotland because his voters know that will really annoy the Scottish political establishment, which in turn will delight his core vote. In the short term, there is little more that can be done than to play into this polarisation and use it to focus progressive voters on why Reform policies must be stopped.

But in the long term, a programme of 'punishing enemies' is counterproductive because while we may take pleasure from seeing our enemies suffer, it is a small part of our lives. The bulk of our lives remains paying for groceries, finding and paying for a home, working life conditions and trying to access public services.

A dynamic in politics which plays into a spiral of resentment to a polarised other ends up with nowhere to go. There is a different theory which says that the way to victory is to offer policies to your opponents which will actually improve their lives without trying to play to prejudices at all. Common Weal calls this 'all of us first', and it is the basis of all our policy work.