Riding the Unicorn - Rory Scothorne - Posted on July 28, 2013 by Roch Wind

• The mainstream left in Scotland stands petrified by the ghost of social democracy and its companion, the zombie-demon of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher’s symbolic role in the transformation of 20th century capitalism is essential to what we can call the ‘containment’ argument, which features prominently in both nationalist and ‘devolutionist’ ideology. According to this position, independence or some degree of autonomy is necessary to protect Scotland from the unholy trinity of free markets, ‘Victorian values’ and xenophobic jingoism that characterised Thatcherism. Thatcher’s main political legacy – New Labour – is a part of this narrative, and the Thatcher-Blair consensus is taken as proof that ‘Scottish values’ have no hope at Westminster.

The demonization of Thatcher is a literal one – she is perceived as a creature of quite astonishing malign power. Her importance in the global shift from the mixed capitalist economies of the USA-led Golden Age to the state-shrinking and multi-centric neoliberal era is not trivial, but we have effectively beatified the iron lady on behalf of the Tory party faithful (a Tory saint being equivalent, of course, to a leftist demon). The implication is that the descent into our current predicament was caused not by the contradictions of welfare capitalism , but by the miraculous will of one British prime minister, whose gains were consolidated by Blairite apostles.

This misdirection plays an essential and dangerous role in the liberal-left ideology of containment. If the manifest ideology of Thatcher and Thatcherism caused rampant inequality, corporate excess, pervasive commodification and so on, then the manifest ideology of Scottish social democracy can contain or even reverse the effects of global capitalism (effects to which the rest of Britain must apparently be abandoned). Such an attitude allows an escape from the truly horrifying realisation that our New Jerusalem of 1945 was an impossible dream: the vast growth of a capitalist consumer economy that demanded cheaply produced goods could not peacefully coexist with the rising wage demands of an empowered working class, so the trade unions and their members were duly cast aside.

Riding the Unicorn - Rory Scothorne - Posted on July 28, 2013 by Roch Wind

http://mairnorarochwind.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/riding-the-unicorn/