To observe the acquiescent wing of the Labour party expressing more dismay at the election of a genuine leftwinger as leader than about Tory proposals to scrap the Human Rights Act (HRA) tells you why they are in retreat right across the party. As one SNP insider said to me last week: “All the mild left luvvies are descending on our conference in Aberdeen because they are scared of getting kicked around their own house this autumn.”
In the run-up to the independence referendum and to May’s general election, Conservative unionists and their allies within Labour attempted to blacken the SNP’s liberal credentials by association. Their trick was to explain the astonishing surge in support for the SNP by linking it with the rise of “extremism” across the globe, including Donald Trump’s tilt at the White House and the rise of the right in Belgium. It’s a geo-political St Elmo’s fire which has everything to do with the politics of the mob and nothing to do with ethics or policies.
In this they seek to convince themselves that the surge in Scottish nationalism is a shortlived event that owes its occurrence to a peculiar set of historical circumstances and popular currents across the globe coming together haphazardly at the same time. God forbid that they would ever credit the supporters of Scottish nationalism with anything approaching political sophistication. They were also eager to insist that no true leftwinger could ever be a nationalist, as this would be to elevate the concerns of one group of people above all others. Thus they introduced the sulphuric whiff of racial supremacy into the mix.
At times, this could be a compelling and seductive narrative. There were many on the left, myself included, who thought long and hard about backing a Yes vote in the independence referendum. How do you weigh your growing attachment to the idea of self-determination with a lifetime commitment to a global struggle of collectivism against capitalism? This view was often and eloquently expressed during the referendum by Douglas Alexander.
What persuaded many of us to back the Yes side last year, however, was a dawning conviction that an independent Scotland might become a hothouse of creatively radical ideas to counter the prevailing orthodoxy of greed, entitlement and stranger suspicion that underpinned the world’s economic power structures. The arrogance and sneering unpleasantness of Alistair Darling just made it a little bit easier.
In Scotland we are currently engaged in debate as to just how radical the SNP actually is. And recent social attitude surveys have shown that, on questions of immigration and refugees, your average Scot is not the enlightened savant of popular liberal imagination. On education, policing and stewardship of the NHS, there are gaping holes in the SNP’s ability to manage these areas. On reflection, though, I’d say that those of us who voted Yes are still happy at having done so and will be eager to do so again when the opportunity arises.
Speeches such as the one Nicola Sturgeon made last week in Glasgow on the HRA simply served to remind us why so many are still happy to support an independent Scotland. Similarly, they viewed her response earlier this month to the Syrian and African refugee crisis as echoing sentiments held deep within the breast of the nation.
On human rights, the first minister gave her most unequivocal commitment to using all means possible to oppose the Tory plans to scrap the act and replace it with a UK Bill of Rights. The final arbiters in any disputes over our rights as citizens would thus pass into the hands of a collection of judges drawn from the tiny social and cultural elite who are so keen to scrap the HRA.
The act prescribes a code of basic decency that obliges governments to protect ordinary citizens, as well as the weak and the vulnerable, from greed, self-interest and power. Underpinning it is a basic assumption that governments of the right and the left are, however, always susceptible to greed, self-interest and power and so must be saved from themselves.
It’s worth being reminded what the HRA holds to be sacrosanct: the right to employment and to a proper wage; the right to share in the economic bounty of the country; the right to protest against unsavoury corporate or government behaviour; to withdraw one’s labour without fear of reprisal; to practise one’s religion and to be respected and treated equally no matter your sexual orientation, skin colour or social background are the mere basics for peaceful co-existence among humans.
It is no surprise then that the act is hated by those groups and interests who have most to gain by its scrapping, among them the present UK Conservative and Unionist party and their business backers. Many of them have been waiting for the day to dawn on a majority Conservative government so that they could resume the class war begun by Margaret Thatcher and interrupted when the act passed into UK law.
They salivate at the prospect of growing their businesses free from the need properly to care for those who make their profits. And they live for the day when they can jettison those whom they deem to be obstacles to their goals of accumulating wealth or exercising influence. They are resentful and bitter at ever having been forced to spend lots of their money looking after sick and fragile people. Society was set up for the strongest and the fittest to prevail; there are no second prizes; you only get one chance. These are their mottos.
Scotland had a chance last year to decouple itself from this deceit and the country blew it. Happily, it looks like we will soon enough be granted a second chance. More important than independence alone, though, is the knowledge that you are living in a country that takes seriously its duties to the weakest and smallest of its citizens.
