Joyce McMillan: ‘Scotland in Europe’ has hollow ring

We wait to hear if the SNP can define what it means by ‘Europe’ and Scotland’s place in it now

ON MY way to the station from the Tron Theatre, on Wednesday night, I turned the corner into George Square, and there they were: the Occupy Glasgow group, gathered in a huddle of a dozen or so small tents, with some larger communal ones in the middle.

Most of them seemed young, like a bunch of students; it was a cold night, but they’d chalked peever squares on the ground, and were skipping around to keep warm. Their banners carried messages. They said: “We are the 99 per cent” or “Who took the money?” or, most memorably, “Live for each other, think for yourself”.

And although it wasn’t a particularly impressive demonstration – there were only a few dozen people there – it seemed like a straw in the wind, a harbinger of changing times; and one that should be much in the minds of Scotland’s governing party, the SNP, as they gather this weekend for their annual conference in Inverness.

In the last week, there have been gestures like this – or much bigger – in cities all across the planet, as the Occupy Wall Street movement goes global, and young people, in particular, begin to question the whole basis of the economic system that is now destroying their lives – chances to pay the bills for its own excesses.

What’s troubling about our situation here in Scotland, though, is that we have a government which both benefits from this mood of disillusion with mainstream politics, and consistently avoids actually stating its position on the crises now shaking the global financial system.

As the singer and activist Billy Bragg was moved to point out in this newspaper this week, Alex Salmond’s SNP government has become something of a beacon of hope for centre-left people across Britain, since the election of the new UK coalition last year; if Scotland is about to suffer a serious financial squeeze, we at least face that trial with a sense that we know roughly what our values are, and where we draw the line when it comes to the privatising impulse now dominant in Westminster politics.

The question, though, is whether a general sense of a slightly different set of priorities and values is going to be enough to carry us through, as the European and global financial crisis intensifies.

Ever since the 1980s, after all – when the SNP leadership had to rethink their strategy, in the aftermath of the first “Scotland’s oil” campaign – the idea of Scotland In Europe has been central to their image as a modernising, outward-looking, and pluralistic national party.

Their concept of independence is founded on the presumption of full EU membership; and it is the party’s policy that an independent Scotland, after a transitional period when we would continue to use sterling, would aim to join the eurozone.

Yet now, this European Union which they SNP has used so long and so skilfully, to soften and nuance the idea of independence, is facing the most profound crisis in its history.

Time and again, the discredited financial gurus of the Anglo-Saxon world lecture the leaders of the eurozone about the need to “get their act together”; that is, apparently, to tax the ordinary voters of France, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands until those countries’ domestic economies stall completely, in order to create a huge bail-out fund for those banks – French, British, American – which have over-invested in dodgy government bonds from Spain, Italy or Greece.

Yet if these financial experts had any sense of politics at all, they would understand that what they are asking is neither possible nor reasonable. The protection of banks cannot be the central long-term purpose of government, however much recent UK and US administrations may have given that impression; and the imposition of a decade of austerity on the eurozone can only be sustained, politically, if governments also take back the power to offer their people some sense of fairness, and of hope for the future, alongside the brutal end to the recent consumer boom that now seems inevitable.

What is destabilising Europe, in other words, is not the failure of European governments to impose enough austerity on their people, but their failure to think politically as well as economically, and to take back sufficient control of the financial and monetary system to be able to make a credible political offer to ordinary citizens, as governments so successfully did in the decades after 1945.

Yet in Inverness this weekend, all we are likely to hear from the SNP leadership about the vast political and economic crisis now facing the governments of Europe, is a vague commitment to restoring conventional “economic growth” as soon as possible, a routine litany of complaint about UK government cuts, and a continuing refusal to enter into any direct discussion of what the word “Europe” might actually mean, ten years from now.

The party continues to benefit, in other words, from the increasing failure of the mainstream UK parties, over the last 20 years, to represent the people, rather than the wealthy corporate interests now so dominant at other party conferences; operating at the margins of UK politics, the SNP is the one that got away, the party that is still allowed to talk the talk of British social democracy.

It remains to be seen, though, whether the SNP’s general commitment to the welfare of the people of Scotland will finally be enough to propel it into a whole new radical age of politics, involving a rigorous confrontation, at European and global level, with the dying ideology of a financial elite which has increasingly lost the political plot.

Or whether, a decade from now, those young people now demonstrating in George Square will be writing the SNP out of political history along with all the other failed parties of our time; the ones who lacked the vision to imagine the age of reduced material consumption and high creative fulfilment into which we must now move, and who finally made one compromise too many with a global system that was broken, and needed not another bail-out, but radical and profound reform.