WHERE ARE ALL THE YOUNG ONES?

At a recent meeting of one of our activist groups I couldn’t help noticing two things. The first was the overall age of the group – I estimate the average age of the seven members to be 70 – the other was the serious shortage of women. In any campaign – particularly for a serious matter such as self-determination or a common welfare project – this does not represent the basis for gaining interest on behalf of a population wide campaign.

We need to engage with the younger generation on a level of communication that they can understand and relate to. This is difficult given the limited avenues of media available and the system we are given to work with but we must try. The national convention is intended for this very purpose and we must understand where the starting point really is. The following extract from Gerry Hassan on “post Sturgeon” sets out where we are really placed on the road to democracy:

“The above must be placed in a wider historical context about how political power is exercised in Scotland. That is the diminution of the SNP to resemble in different ways a mixture of New Labour and Scottish Labour – a top-down politics of discipline from the former and a court politics shaped by patronage and an insider class of entitlement from the latter.

Scotland’s lack of democracy and democratic traditions are central in this. The Scottish Parliament was established as an institution administered by the old Scottish Office and nexus of institutions which had grown up pre-devolution. There was little thought or planning undertaken by Labour and home rule campaigners into how any of this democratised Scotland; even more some in Labour consciously saw it as about none of this but rather the maintenance of Labour one party rule in Scotland.

Besides this the Parliament was established as mainstream democracy was being corroded and hollowed out in the face of the whirlwind of neoliberalism. As the fanfare of the Parliament’s opening took place all around the Western world the democratic impulse was being weakened by the forces of inequality, wealth and privilege, which have subsequently turned the world upside down.

In this environment, the devolution experiment of the past 25 years under Labour and the SNP centred around a politics of caution, management and administration, has been threadbare and inadequate. But that is sadly true of mainstream politics across the West.

Redoubtable campaigners such as Lesley Riddoch and Andy Wightman rightly make the charge against the excessive and continual centralisation of public life and the cutting down of what passed for local democracy and autonomy. In this, they ignore the lack of democracy which has passed for civic life and the reality that any supposed ‘golden age’ of local government up to the 1974 reorganisation was nothing of the kind, but more about the elite, patrician, class rule of elders.

This is the bigger take from the story of Sturgeon and what made ‘Sturgeonism’ possible. We do not need to just revive democracy in Scotland and return to some mythical, idealised past. Rather we need to invent it in the first place along with the cultures, values and processes informing and underpinning it. ‘Sturgeonism’ and what the SNP became are direct products of the undemocracy which defines our politics and public life. A starting point must be an honest debate about what this means and how to challenge and change this state of affairs.

Without this, the conservative with a small ‘c’ politics which shape Scotland will continue, high on rhetoric, but low on substance, and the people and communities who most need active, interventionist government and public action, will be neglected and failed by a politics which was meant to put their interests and voice centre stage. That is the legacy of ‘Sturgeonism’ and the sooner we wake up the better.”

That last paragraph says it all. Unlike Gerry Hassan, however, I am more inclined to condemn the system than the individual but how does this affect the young and many women too? The problem which has been with us for generations lies in the idea of patronage. Those in power tell us what to do and there is little we seem to be able to do to express our real needs or any way to make them part of democratic decision making. The work we are undertaking and that which RSS are making inroads into is directed at establishing a working democracy which, it is claimed in the article, we have never had.

So how do we engage the young, women, everybody!?

We need to develop platforms for local democracy but we need also to give them authority and to do that we must engage individuals who command attention, together with groups and NGOs to create a single voice and can work outside the present system but without going to war with them, as it were. We need to persuade the system itself that it must change and to do that requires a mass organisation. We’re working on it, in the meantime please support us both at Scotland Decides and RSS.

Thank you.