Eco-Socialism: How is Left Wing Politics Changing in Scotland?
Scotland has been home to fairly fierce debate on issues of independence and Brexit for what seems like an eternity to most people. With COP26 approaching and environmental issues being placed at the centre of public discourse, many people are becoming familiarised with new terms – “Eco-Socialism” being one of them.
Socialism in Scotland has an unsurprisingly long history, arguably ignited by John Maclean in the early 20th century and more recently carried forward by Tommy Sheridan and the SSP in the Scottish Parliament. The Labour Party, the SNP and the Greens have all had socialists elected in Scotland but until recently, there has been a failure to get mainstream traction behind these ideas.
Discussing the shifting political landscape in Scotland, Paul Sweeney MSP, said: “(Private capital) is inherently exploitative and will always seek the lowest cost solution, it will always seek the profit maximising solution, it has little incentive to make riskier investments as it is an incredibly risk averse attitude. This is why you see huge amounts of capital invested in lazy industries like landlordism. You need the state to drive capital in the direction that adds something positive to mankind.
“I’m a big disciple of Mariana Mazzucato from the London School of Economics, she has written a book called ‘The Entrepreneurial State’ and it’s the idea that the only large-scale progress we have seen as a society has been through state intervention. So, the state forces capital in a direction to achieve public goods. Private capital on its own will never do this.”
The Scottish Greens have been proponents of radical change since their separation from their British counterpart, focusing on the ecological crisis and supporting the implementation of large-scale changes to society. The Scottish Labour Party, although has offered some socialist policies within its manifestos, has also been home to the ideas of the neo-liberal-right under New Labour in the early 2000s.
The notion of a ‘Green New Deal’ (GND) is something that has been inescapable for people following mainstream news, however, it is yet to be seen whether it goes far enough to protect workers. If there is to be societal changes with how we work, how we travel or how we eat, the government must step in to ensure those affected by the change are not losing their jobs because of AI or unable to get to work because of an underfunded, privatised public transport system
Discussing the GND and how it would help working people, he said: “There are various ideas about what the green new deal will look like. A potentially Labour or Green idea would look very different from a Conservative or potentially even an SNP idea. Our idea is that everyone is involved, significant state planning to take the risks of these frontier technologies on. It’s almost like the space programme. If you think back to 1960’s in America, the state in America took all the risk in developing these novel technologies for Apollo 11 and this allowed success to be achieved in a very short space of time- within eight years they were on the moon.
“That’s the level of planning that’s needed, the target is net zero, we need to build industrial opportunities around it, we need to build companies around it. We need to get Scottish Power back under public ownership so that Scottish Power has more incentive to build factories, have a division of research into renewables and recruit engineers to design and build these things in Scotland. Unfortunately, because the current system of government allows huge amount of foreign ownership of our economy, including Scottish Power which is owned by a Spanish company and is in turn owned by the state investment banks of Qatar and Norway.
“It always comes back to being about how ‘public ownership is too expensive’; do you think the original people who bought it when it was privatised were doing it for charitable reasons? They’re obviously making a lot of money from it, and I believe that money should be given back to the public rather than a tax haven in the Virgin Isles.”
Although eco-socialism is taking up more space in public discourse than ever before, it is unclear whether this will lead to a mass backing of the ideas behind it. There is still much debate about the arguments surrounding the GND, but it is clear that radical change is on the horizon, whether it is reform or further climate destruction is a question this global generation of politicians must answer.