Scotland’s future: PM Farage or left-wing populist independence

The people don’t care about the rules any more, because the rules haven’t worked for them.

Since the millennium, there’s been fundamentally no difference between ruling parties in the West. Centrist governments adhered to an economic doctrine which crushed living standards for the poor, dismantled middle-class ambitions, and protected the rich.

Read more by Neil Mackay

• The SNP may be done but independence is still worth fighting for
• Why the best hope for independence is the SNP getting thrashed
• Why the rise of Reform can be the making of the Yes movement

Astonishingly, it became the far-right, the hard-right, the populist-right, which saw the opportunity to fill the gap - and sometimes, like Donald Trump, swallowed failed governing parties. Today’s Trumps and Farages offer rage and blame. That’s worked.

The left, which, theoretically at least, exists to help the poor, just abandoned its mission. Keir Starmer’s Government now swims against the tide of history. In an era when politics is bloody, he’s bloodless.

Starmer took power simply because there was no alternative. Venality drained the Tories dry. So people voted in despair for insipid Starmer and his gutless manifesto.

Once he fails, where does Britain turn? There’s nowhere left but Reform.

For an electorate desperate for change, for help - for a revolution in how we run society - Starmer merely presents a more managerial form of went before.

Essentially, little will alter under Starmer. Corporations will still suck us dry, the poor will see living standards decline further, and the middle-class will watch their lives go backwards.

People want action and passion. In a trajectory that historians will mull for centuries, it’s Trump and other far-right chancers providing that sense of action and passion.

People want the status quo smashed. Far-right chancers offer to do the smashing.

People want their grievances listened to … the far-right pretends to listen.

Where is the left? Why is the left not full of its historic passion, why is the left not acting, not promising to smash the status quo, not listening to the people?

The answer is this: what passes for the left was co-opted by the centre. It’s adopted positions barely distinguishable from the right on everything from immigration to economics. Traditional parties are now simply a centrist sludge.

All this matters to Scotland. We’re subject to the same historic tides, yet Scotland is the one western country where politics can play differently, because Scotland has a unique political dimension - called independence.

Within independence there’s the same DNA which fuels public rage across the West: it’s essentially anti-status quo. Independence is a vehicle for absolute change; it’s the original disruptor ideology.

People don’t care how their rage is expressed or by whom; they don’t care who brings change, or disrupts the status quo. People just want their anger acknowledged, and for someone to kick in doors on their behalf. People want the status quo dead. Again, it doesn’t matter who does the killing.

If the left could find the guts and brains to position itself as a populist movement on behalf of the people, it could neutralise the far-right.

The far-right promises to smash the status quo - not by changing the economic system, but crucifying migrants. That, in the end, will change nothing. The rich will get richer. The far-right pretends it’s pro-worker, but it really loves the wealthy.

The left needs to find its backbone and promise to obliterate the status quo on behalf of the people, by turning its fire on profiteering corporations, companies gouging the consumer, and the tax-dodging super-rich.

Harness rage and champion the working-class, and the left can ride the wave of change. Stay the same and the left is finished for generations - replaced as a movement of the people by the far-right. If that happens, our society’s decline merely accelerates.

Independence can refashion itself around a populist left message. Make the Yes movement angry, an agent of real change - not an advocate of palace revolution as it was in 2014 where all that would have altered was the flag. Make it a threat to the status quo, make it stand shoulder to shoulder with the people.

Farage will soon be close to power. For now, Scotland remains more inclined to the left than the right. There’s time to reposition the Yes movement as the ultimate opposition to British right-wing extremism - to use Farage as the bogeyman he is. The message from the independence movement should be: ‘It’s either us or them, Reform or Independence, vote Yes or get PM Farage’.

John Swinney is as insipid as Starmer. These aren’t the people which the moment demands. Swinney and Starmer will eventually be swept away by the tide of history that’s rolling around the world. We can’t get swept away with them.

An equation can be crafted to explain the state of the West: decades of political failure by the same bunch of people, plus decades of financial agony, equals the end of the road for the status quo.

Independence can refashion itself around a populist left message. (Image: Colin Mearns)

People are angry. The only side offering to act on anger is the far-right. The left must find its own populist expression of anger; nobody wants meaningless platitudes anymore.

In Scotland, there’s a ready-made vehicle to express public anger: independence. However, in its current form the SNP is too milksop to lead such a populist movement.

That leaves Scotland facing a future where we’re swept up in the inevitable hard-right drift that’s coming in England. Either that, or another party, a new party, takes over the Yes movement and uses it as a bulwark, making politics a straight - but ugly - ‘us v them’ fight.

For the SNP to lead such a movement, it would have to collapse amid electoral defeat and then refashion itself. That could happen, but it might take too long before those historic tides beat our way.

The worst possible scenario is that the SNP simply clings to power, thereby suffocating hopes of the Yes movement morphing into a left populist vehicle.

If that happens, the hard-right will one day take Scotland too - because the status quo cannot continue. The people will not permit that to happen.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer at Large. He’s a multi-award-winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs, cultural commentary, and foreign and domestic politics