Ballast from the past

Yesterday's pundit-consensus on the SNP's new poll lead was reasonably settled. For a start, a Scottish Parliament simply focuses more attention on Scottish dimensions - and a self-proclaimedly ''Scottish'' party, particularly one as respectable and mainstream as the SNP, is bound to benefit from these new, narrower horizons.

But more substantively, the nationalists are also the silent recipients of Scottish disgruntlement with New Labour's reforming zeal. And it's the source of this disgruntlement which is the key issue. Do Scots have a distinct, coherent, essentially social-democratic political culture - one that resists restructuring of the welfare state; opposes the New Labour shift from collective to individual responsibility in areas like education and health; and which isn't consumed by a Middle-English fear of higher taxes and wealth redistribution? And which will endorse a party which appears to defend those preferences?

Or is this resistance to High Blairism an unthinking, provincial atavism - something which will eventually be broken down by contact with the real world? On the latter reading, the Scottish voter may well find solace in the SNP - but only because they have until now strenuously avoided debating the ''tough choices'' and the ''hard questions'' about democracy and markets in the next century. We're foolishly sleepwalking away from Blairism, made thick-headed by the ancient vapours of nationalist resentment - heading for a world where One Wee Nation, Holding Hands Together is no match for global markets, frantic consumerism, pluralist societies, revolutionising techno-science.

To be honest, I've witnessed this clash of rhetorical titans - between Future-Blair and the Ancient Scottish Consensus - once too many times: and for all its fun as spectator sport, I don't think it takes us forward one inch. So I turned with some relief to the Scottish Council Foundation's paper, in the hope that they would serve up some of the ''independent thinking'' their strapline promises. As it turns out, it's just independent enough - but only by its failure to be as thoroughly Blairite as its title suggests. ''Holistic'' government is, if you haven't noticed, the newest New Labour buzz-word. Like ''holistic'' medicine, it aims to prevent the body politic from getting ill in the first place - rather than applying cures to social problems after they've developed, and gone tumerous.

Holistic government isn't about spending money to treat more patients - but spending money to encourage them to lead healthier lifestyles in the first place. It wouldn't deploy resources to massively improve teacher-studentratios - but it would deploy them to create a generation of duteous, hard-working pupils, supported by conscientious parents. Holistic government, most notably, will not subsidise inactivity on welfare - but will use the same cash to engineer the unemployed into a state of employability.

The authority on all this is, predictably, the Demos think-tank - and their anonymous android, the immortally titled Perri 6. (He's not a free man, he's a number). But read Mr 6's original pamphlet on holistic governing, and in the very first page you bump into what we must now accept is a different political culture.'' After a century of growth'', he writes, ''governments in all Western countries have become caught between the public's resistance to paying more tax, and their continuing demand for government to provide high-quality welfare, infrastructures and social order.''

If this is the historical justification for political holism, then it makes perfect sense. Tax-averse majorities aren't willing to pay for the freedom of others to fail - the traditional social-democratic safety net that ensures the basics of income, residence, access to facilities and social services, as a universal right. But they will pay for governance that produces results - like less crime, smarter kids, less unemployment, a healthier community - regardless of how those results are achieved. And if that requires a certain social authoritarianism - the controlling and shaping of popular behaviour, through

a multitude of sticks and carrots,

coercions and persuasions, surveillance and monitoring - then so be it.

But what if a nation's people are, at the very least, not fundamentally resistant to paying more tax - as the Scottish referendum result indicated? The Scottish Foundation Council's paper simply doesn't mention this difference in the fiscal tolerance of Scots. They read holistic governance more as a means of getting the best out of the Scottish executive, or as a fuzzy way to manage the inevitable political coalitions of a Scottish Parliament, or that political actors in Scotland should share more goals, rather than fight among themselves.

Who could disagree with that - or even with the desire to revitalise the functioning of the state, to deliver better services for the same cost (or less)? Isn't that kind of dynamism what we've always wanted from a Scottish adminstration? Yet the Perri 6/Demos/New Labour version has a hint of cold steel about it, which the SCF version thankfully lacks. For example, there is no sign of the extremely creepy, semi-cybernetic enthusiasm for mind-control advocated by Mr 6 - where ''governments cannot conceivably be neutral in the cultures of the governed''.

If ''villains'', says Perri, can achieve the cultural changes they want in nations - villains like the Nazis or the Serbs, to take his own examples - then ''why can there not be more beneficent agents of change?'' Hold on: what's being implied here? That the difference between techniques of effective cultural governance - between fascist totalitarianism, and ''Third Way'' Blairism, for example - is simply a matter of malign and benign governors? I damn well hope not - and I'm not surprised this theoretical idiocy has, in the Scottish version, been put on the back burner. It all depends whether you think cultures are there to be governed - or whether you recognise that they govern themselves. As more informed thinkers like the Catalonian urbanist Manuel Castells would note, national identities are increasingly becoming ballast in a tumultuous, breakneck world. And the substance of this ballast

is the historic nation's rich combination of experience, landscape, art, cultural tradition, language, religion. The national identity sustains and informs the values of the state, says Castells - not the other way round, as the brand-merchants and mind-moulders of Demos presume.

It is Scotland's historical ballast that allows its people to keep a distance from the chilly, slightly inhuman neophilia of High Blairism - and conceive of other, more humane ways to achieve a 21st-century nation. Our indigenous wonks are beginning to direct their wonking into this interesting space. Would that the SNP even recognised that it was there.