Pat Kane: Are MakTowns the way to go?

Loki is a provocateur – as well as a powerful artist – and I think his recent blog is a good provocation. He is asking his compatriots and comrades in the Yes and Indy movement whether they remain clear about the reasons why they wanted a separate Scottish state the first place. Just for its own sake? Or because it would bring about a fairer and more equal society?

What’s made him crack in his support for the SNP – to the extent of abstaining on the first vote, and giving his second to the new left-green party Rise – was the announcement by Nicola Sturgeon that the ScotGov wouldn’t seek a 50 per cent upper rate on income tax, even though they had the new powers to impose it.

A civil service report suggested that it might lose Scotland £30 million a year due to “behaviour change” – polite talk for the super rich moving their cash over our borders, to evade the new rate. Loki started to call the SNP government “fearties” on social media, not just reneging on earlier promises, but – worse – accepting Tory assumptions about the mobility and irresponsibility of the affluent.

And then his harrowing broadside online – beginning with an account of his own mother’s disintegration as an alcoholic and addict, directly connecting her brutal living conditions to her corroded, unstable character, and her early death. We need to hear more stories about what grinding poverty does to people’s normal social and caring instincts; you’ll read few accounts more intense than this.

But this wasn’t the only tale of the working poor I’d read in the same day. Paul Mason, ex-Channel Four economics editor and author of the recent Postcapitalism, was also writing about his own working-class youth.

Mason’s childhood era was the 1960s and 70s (Loki’s is the 80s and 90s) – and Paul was comparing the stabilities and ambitions of his youth to recent stats on the decline in school attainment levels of white working-class English boys by comparison with other ethnicities (and girls).

Paul had an autodidact dad in a crap labouring job, who sat his son on a stone floor and drew him pictures of Oxford and Cambridge, as something to aim for. The son took all the opportunities for advance that the tail-end of the post-war welfare state could give him.

Mason laments that those in his position today have lost their “story” of progress – a story smashed to pieces, deliberately and strategically, by Thatcherism’s assault on the “solidarity” and “orderliness” of working-class life. With perhaps Loki’s disordered experiences as an extreme consequence of that.

How can we “find a new form of economics” that can “allow the working population – without nostalgia and racism – to rediscover and redefine its own story”, asks Mason?

Now from the Scottish perspective, there could be an obvious answer to this question – not so much rooted in an economic model, but in national sentiment.

The clear class disparity in votes for Yes, and the current thumping endorsement of the SNP by ex-Labour voters, may well be evidence that positive patriotic feeling trumps economic deprivation to some degree – given that the percentage levels in poverty are not so different between Scotland and the rest of the UK.

It’s this that Loki is calling out – along with others like the STUC, writers like Gerry Hassan and various left-green groups. Could the “story” of Scottish nationhood – so thumpingly endorsed in recent election after election – actually be a way of avoiding hard questions about inequality in Scotland? If they can’t tackle the rich now when they have the option, said Loki in a podcast a few days ago, then what does it say for what will happen after Indy, when times will be tougher and more demanding?

(I note in passing that the current Scottish Labour Party is donning some of these rhetorical robes. The same Scottish Labour Party whose last leader but one stood up to criticise Scotland as a “something for nothing” welfarist culture, describing as “freebies” the very benefits that they currently want to raise general taxation for).

I hope SNP supporters and the SNP government understand exactly what these objections are – that is, friendly but targeted fire, from positions of frustration. At a time of huge electoral endorsement for the lead party of independence, the path towards that end seems as twisted (and sometimes self-subverting) as it ever was. This level of political control must mean the ability to do something. Mustn’t it?

Maybe there’s a different Scottish “story” to start composing that might address some of McGarvey’s deeply felt anger about the persistence of Scottish poverty. I think there’s a clue to it in the fact the Scottish Greens and the SNP have both identified a Scotland that “can” as a core political metaphor. See the energy bursting out of Stewart Bremner’s graphic for the Greens’ Scotland Can poster, or Sturgeon’s Can-Do Scotland as the slogan for the current Year of Innovation.

There is a huge amount of passion, churned into despair, when we think of a Scotland that “can’t” – particularly in terms of powers reserved to Westminster. Can’t stop Trident being recommissioned, can’t distance ourselves from the corruption at the heart of its financial and political elites, can’t control our broadcasting...

Like many others, I nurse that wrath to keep it warm. But I also have to move the fire to another room – otherwise it’s difficult to draw a breath in a Scotland that did, after all, vote No.

But the Scotland that “can” should be a much deeper and wider phenomenon than one conjured up by party-political sloganeering, or by creative-economy buzzwords. And if our focus is rightly on poverty, perhaps we have to think completely differently and radically about how the poorest districts in Scotland can deploy the resources they have in a very different way.

I’ll give you one major policy idea, complemented by one small and inspiring example that could scale to match it. This next Scottish Government should commit to trailing a basic or citizen’s income scheme in some of the poorest areas in Scotland – following the precedent set in many areas in Europe and Scandinavia. It should be set a such a level that we can test whether its most idealistic ambitions could be realised: that is, it provides a secure platform from which people can compose a meaningful life of work, care and play. One that allows their better angels to be expressed, rather than stress and insecurity distorting their characters, as Loki movingly describes.

And in each of those areas, we should build a much enhanced and better developed version of the MakLab studios, currently operating in Glasgow and Dumfries. The MakLabs are 21st century skillshops and workshops – friendly, diverse places where people come in to make all manner of things, whether components to fix a house or a household machine, or a canoe or shawl, using a range of accessible manufacturing tools.

We should do this to see if basic income does indeed allow people to find ways to be active and purposeful in their communities according to their own choice, rather than the dictates of a low-wage, poor-quality labour market.

Land and community reform in Scotland is already the context for this level of radical self-control. But it could also be a way of testing out a post-work Scotland – a way to prepare for the coming upheaval in the kind and availability of jobs, compelled by automation, climate change, emerging economies and demographics. We built New Towns in the 60s and 70s. Why not MakTowns in the 2010s?

Is this an alternative to Darren’s class “standing up and speaking for itself”? Not at all. Let that take the forms it may, and must. But it might be a wise government that thinks ahead about how it might respond to that demand.

The MakLab website is www.maklab.co.uk.

Pat Kane is a musician and writer (www.patkane.today)