I read an interesting blog post by Scottish campaigner/journalist Robin McAlpine discussing the UTK march. I think it’s relevant to the topic we’re discussing. I also think McAlpine has more of an idea as to why people marched than Milli Hill seems to. I pasted some interesting bits below:
http://robinmcalpine.org/politics-as-usual-has-absolutely-no-story-to-tell-us-about-our-future/
THE Unite the Kingdom march has unnerved me deeply. Or rather, it is a visible demonstration of what has been unnerving me for a while. We’re losing the political debate to the hard right – and I think we have precisely one chance to turn this around.
Because I am equally unnerved by the response. Those who oppose hard and far-right politics are seeking to use techniques from a different era – appeals to reason by summits of establishment elites, attempts at quarantine and isolation, moral broadsides.
None of this is working or has any chance of working. Elite lectures are the problem, not the solution. Isolation is over; it isn’t possible now. Trying to persuade people out of this by telling them they’re bad people is only making things worse.
There is only one possible solution – we need to tell a better story about people’s lives. We have given up even pretending that the lives of an awful lot of people in this country are going to get better.
Instead, we tell them stories about how life is going to get better for those for whom life is already good – landlords, chief executives, financiers, quango types. When the Scottish Government says “GDP growth is the number one priority”, that doesn’t mean us. It doesn’t mean citizens.
We are still living off trickle-down economics. What do we get out of GDP growth? Better public services, apparently. Do the politicians know that GDP has been growing almost uninterrupted for 40 years? When’s it going to work?
We see the wealthy get special treatment, but we don’t see our public services getting better and we don’t see our wages rising. The professional management classes (the people who actually run the country and its economy) do well out of this. Everyone else?
…This is the problem; politics as usual has absolutely no story about our future. The only future they can see is the present with some tweaks. Politicians of almost all stripes have bought into the idea that politics is just a technocratic management process which involves “choices” based on “values”, but only at the margins.
Otherwise, they simply audition as the best candidate to manage the machine. All that politics does now is that every five years it shuffles the faces telling you that GDP is the only thing that really matters, each election the vainglorious pursuit of a better manager.
Brown would manage things better than Blair, who fixed Major’s messes, until Cameron arrived to manage Brown’s mistakes away. May would repair what Cameron did, Johnson would repair what all of them did. Truss basically did an extreme version of the same which Sunak had to “fix” before the solution was Starmer – which now has its own solution in Burnham…
…And the ruling class’s latest wheeze? Rapidly destroy jobs so the rich can get much, much richer. They call it AI. It is going to free up your leisure time – with which you can forage for food.
All of this is playing with fire and has been for a long time. None of it is truthful. It is not true that GDP growth will lead to better public services if the owners of that growth export it abroad.
…The left has been little better, a whine about all the things we want stopped, tinged with a significant degree of disdain for those who don’t have our university education. Environmentalists seem to have a view of the future which is “this, but with some of the things that make you happy taken away”.
…At this point, a lecture or a stern telling-off or a boycott is utterly pointless. Saying “GDP’ to them is contemptuous.
If we can’t persuade them we give half a damn about them and their lives, and that we’ve got some kind of plan for making their lives better which stretches a lot further than “we’ll make the rich richer first and see what happens”, this horror will be our future.