It’s a long time since the Scottish left found its home amid the clangs, sparks and shouts of the nation’s ship and steelyards. In today’s economy of professions and services, of university graduates and the technological juggernaut, leftism has become a middle-class pursuit. It is, largely, a hobby of the urban sophisticate, more likely to inhabit a spacious Glasgow tenement than a modest council house, whose hands remain wholly uncalloused. Eye strain is the greatest risk posed by their day job.
But the high-water mark of this modern caste has also passed. It encapsulated a decade that took in the independence referendum, with its exultant gatherings and angry slogans; the Jeremy Corbyn years where, for the briefest of periods, it seemed like the hard left might somehow seize the machinery of the UK state; and Nicola Sturgeon’s hegemonic phase, during which the Scottish Greens were brought into coalition to join a government that sought socialist ends through the prosecution of socialist means.
In the end, it is hard to avoid the judgment that it all amounted to a lot of noise about not very much. The independence project failed, as did Corbyn, definitively, and Sturgeon’s administration lost itself in a jungle of constitutional wrangling, gender wars, and interventionist policies that collapsed upon contact with reality.
Sturgeon and Corbyn are no longer on the scene, and now Patrick Harvie, the co-leader of the Scottish Greens, is also taking his place in the rear-view mirror. After 17 years in post, he announced this week that he is standing down.
If Corbyn and Sturgeon were the moment’s most high-profile flag bearers, there is perhaps no one who represents it more perfectly than Harvie. He was Scotland’s king of woke, who finagled his way into office as a junior minister and wagged the SNP dog until it was reeling. Many of Sturgeon’s most damaging experiments originated with the Greens, or at least benefited from their enthusiastic support.
Harvie was anti-growth, hostile to the private sector and the West, an avid taxer and an environmental puritan who was determined to force behavioural change on the Scottish population, regardless of expense or the electorate’s opinion. His fate matched that of his allies on the left – he overreached, lacked humility or the capacity for compromise, won too few friends and hacked off too many people, and ultimately found himself and his party jettisoned from government by Sturgeon’s successor Humza Yousaf. Typically, his ego could not accept that outcome, and he took revenge by orchestrating Yousaf’s subsequent downfall. That decision brought the centrist pair of John Swinney and Kate Forbes to power – but still, the scorpion got to kill its frog.
The current First Minister and his deputy are indicative of a world that has altered almost beyond recognition. They have manoeuvred the Nats away at pace from the Sturgeon/Harvie agenda, aware that voters had tired of the relentless hectoring and obsession with fringe issues. That decision has not only seen the SNP government stabilise, but build up a substantial lead over Scottish Labour. At this point, the bets are on Swinney remaining in Bute House after next year’s Holyrood election.
There will be no going back. The totems that inspire the left are all under attack and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Welfare is being slashed rather than expanded. Defence spending is rising and foreign aid shrinking, amid the prospect of cold or even hot war. The state is being curbed, and not just at Westminster – Forbes’s ministerial ally Ivan McKee is forcing quangos to shrink and is looking to reduce the civil service headcount. There is little talk of policies that could be classed as woke. New oil and gas projects look likely to be approved, while Rachel Reeves backs a third runway at Heathrow. It seems that Net Zero targets will be allowed to slip further in the name of energy security. There is public support for the nuclear deterrent, even among a majority of SNP voters. Economic growth is the first priority of administrations on both sides of the border.
What fresh energy there is in politics looks to be on the right, as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK maintains its strength in Westminster and Holyrood polls. Whether it is Swinney or Labour’s Anas Sarwar who triumphs next May, there will be no return to government for the Greens, or any agenda that embraces unaffordable progressive policies. They will do what successful politics requires them to.
Where does this leave the left? Roughly where it has spent most of its history – as a protest movement. There is a constituency that will always put its ideological principles above political reality and pragmatism – it can be found in those leafy urban streets. It will join marches against benefit cuts, nuclear bombs and Israel. It loathes the SNP’s move to the centre and Labour’s moderation. It will grow old clinging to its beliefs, wedded to preaching its moral integrity. There are votes there, though I’m not sure there are many. There are certainly not enough.
And so its leaders will chunter from the backbenches and shriek through megaphones. There will certainly be much for them to shout about and argue against. But to what end? Then again, for people like this, ineffective piety is often easier than the ghastly deal-making required to get stuff done. It’s what they’re best at.
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