There was an excellent really informative post-referendum piece by
Mark Blyth (Professor of Political Economy at Brown University. Author of Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, & Great Transformations.) on the Doug Henwood show last week - really really recommend the half hour listen. It's on itunes
here (top one) and if you don't do itunes it'll be
here soon. Oh hang on, can listen to it now
here. Honestly do have a listen.
I finally got round to listening to that podcast. I’m afraid it wasn’t very interesting or insightful, or anything new. It’s exactly what we’ve been hearing from commentators gravitating towards the Labour left (such as it is) in Scotland for years.
A clue to how his analysis was skewed could be found towards the end of the piece in his admission that he’d have voted No (with some regrets) and then (somewhat reluctantly) Labour in the GE next year (but would come to regret that) if he still lived in Scotland.
Not that I disagreed with many of his impressions, broad brush though they often were, but that I think he was actually wrong about some of the stuff you wouldn’t have expected him to be wrong about, as an economics lecturer. And in his fundamental strategic inclinations, I think we is just plain wrong.
As an example of the former point - the economic inaccuracies - he describes the Barnet formula in broad strokes as money Holyrood (previously St Andrew’s House, prior to devolution) is granted by Westminster. He returns to that a few times, using it to make several points. Now, it’s true that that is a widespread belief, but it isn’t the whole picture. It doesn’t take into account the fact that more money travels from the polity of Scotland to Westminster in revenues than returns as Barnet. He much later briefly corrects that impression (contradicting his previous points), only to in the same breath get the situation of London wrong. (As I’ve discussed in detail elsewhere in the past, London is heavily subsidised by the rest of the UK in ways that aren’t included in the balance sheets).
I agree with him that the SNP is problematic and contradictory. But he is seriously out of date in some of his assessments. He seems to confuse SNP voters with the SNP itself, which does rather undermine some of his assumptions. It’s true that there are rural conservatives who vote SNP (although he completely avoids the issue of, and therefore seems to make the mistake of, thinking all rural dwellers are Tory-inclined farmers and landowners: there is a huge rural poverty issue, with associated bad housing conditions etc, and a large number of people who are neither landowners nor wealthy, and in poorly paid, unstable, insecure, and part time/ short term employment, or out of work), but those rural SNP-voting heartlands in the rural North East are also areas where those same voters voted No.
There is one major SNP figure who fits his description, in the person of Mike Russell, the (rather bizarre) free-marketeer, who wants Scotland to be a low wage economy, but he is very much on his own in that, and his views about an independent Scotland are besides the point that Mark Blythe makes, because the rural conservatives who might be supposed to support Russell’s version of Scottish independence don’t support Scottish independence; they voted No.
Furthermore, Russell’s vision was not that laid out in the White Paper. We wouldn’t have been getting Russell’s version of independence, although I could foresee him setting up a right of centre party in an independent Scotland. (This has been discussed in the thread).
As for the effects of MU; we’ve done that to death. I personally think an independent Scotland should have a separate Scottish currency, and a separate central bank (although without the powers to set interest rates etc that the BofE has: government should retain those directly).
The SNP strategy was to suggest there’d be as little change as possible (which begs the question “why bother, then?”); this was an electoral strategy. But I strongly suspect also that MU was only a short term economic policy prior to setting up a separate currency, designed to have the effect of mitigating/diminishing currency speculation in the event of independence (which is why they couldn’t announce that that was the aim). But we’ve been through all this in the thread, and the effects thereof.
In short, I think Blythe is mistaken about much of what he thinks would ensue, not least because he appears misinformed about some of what the SNP’s policies were.
He is also rather contradictory. On the one hand he uses Ireland as an outcome, and on the other hand says the SNP’s Scotland wouldn’t have been like Ireland.
He also both grasps and misses the point that many of us were not voting Yes in support of the SNP, but in support of what could be achieved that cannot be achieved within the UK system, with all that the UK state, establishment and political system implies. It was a starting point, not an endpoint. He also fails to address why it is flirting with nationalism to want to imagine something different from the UK establishment, but not nationalist to want to retain the British state intact. Especially since he agrees that the way things are is deeply unsatisfactory. He has nothing to offer us that Keeping Britain Whole achieves. He just supports the No outcome out of some ill-defined emotional impulse. I’m afraid, Mark, that sounds very like British nationalism to me.
In the end all he offers us is the hope that the engagement of the campaign translates into electoral engagement. Well, in his own analysis, that gives us the choice of neoliberalism or neoliberalism-with-airbags. (I’d actually argue that the latter is the
promise of neoliberalism-with-airbags, which is something very different. Labour in government and the LibDems in coalition both
promise neoliberalism-with-airbags. I’m not so sure they deliver it).
This is the strategic stuff I think he’s wrong on. It’s a faith in electoralism that isn’t actually supported by the things he says about neoliberalism and Westminster party strategy (most of which I agree with him on). It’s an un-evidenced support for keeping the British State Whole which is based on nothing more than a dislike of nationalism, despite the fact that it is in itself nationalist, and despite the fact that he has already agreed that the Yes campaign wasn’t about nationalism, but about getting away from austerity and neoliberalism.
All of this – all of it – has been discussed to death in Scotland in the years leading up to September 18th, and all of it on this thread.
