Pat Kane: Cold turkey in my recovery from political addiction

Two clear aversions have risen within me, helping to remove some of these mainlines. One is the sheer, near-unspeakable abomination of this thumping-majority, five-year-long Tory Government. It’s such a triumph of elite power – gaslighting, bamboozling and seducing its target classes; a regime now possessing enough authority to execute all its creepy alt-right dreams – that I need to deny its reality. At least for these early months.

So no more Good Morning Scotland during the morning constitutional, or the Today programme over toast; no more Politics Live over lunch break, or a late-night Newsnight and whisky. As little as possible of the unctuous Huw Edwards, and not even a homeopathic trace of Laura Kuenssberg. Online is trickier, but I’ve mostly managed it. About six podcasts paused, scores of fellow Twitter anoraks muted.

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So is Dominic Cummings attacking Whitehall with a horde of hired mercenaries? Is Boris Johnson planning a BBC-Netflix merger? Will your next NHS appointment conclude (or commence) with Touch And Pay? They could be. However, for the moment, I’d just like them out of my forebrain; not part of my consensus reality; switched off and edited out like an especially grubby episode of Black Mirror. Their very presence depletes me (which, I suspect, is part of the plan).

Some of you, observing my media diet, might concernedly suggest: weren’t you in a bit deep, pal? Yes, guilty. But it was the objective drama of the contest – an out-and-out left-green policy prospectus, presented by elders from the radical 70s, versus some populist action-slogans repeated by an amoral, upper-class elitist – that animated my media addiction. Surely this offer must win? Surely this vacuity can’t win? And thus, my instant fall into the mists of self-protection, after the big exit poll projection on Broadcasting House.

I noticed that The New European newspaper used the same image for the result – an extinguished candle – as the cartoonist Chris Cairns did, when representing the 2014 indyref result (much more brilliantly). That a majority of the UK working class could so actively vote against their own material interests, on every level, still doesn’t really compute to me. So yes, a snuffing out. Time for the dark womb for a bit.

Which brings me to my second massive aversion, triggering my media switch-off: the Corbynite left, and their instant analysis, reframing and returning to the fray. Peace, I beg you, for one moment!

Yet it’s considerably my own fault. Not so much the leadership, but the policy community around CorbLab I definitely bought into. Much of my own long-term agenda – the hard limits of our planetary boundaries, the unlimited nature of our tech and desires, the inexorable enrichment of elites, the general wisdom and skills to join up these dots – seemed to be directly addressed by CorbLab’s Big Plans.

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There seemed like the possibility of maybe managing and navigating well the next 10-30 years, instead of blundering through it with opportunists and corporate patsies at the wheel. Scotland’s progressive governance has been champing at the bit to address these great challenges. In the past few months, I often allowed myself a sigh of relief, at the prospect of another party (comprising a progressive UK majority) able to do some of this heavy lifting.

But it’s not to be – and brutally, in fact, it’s the very opposite. Significant parts of the southern electorate seemed to prefer to shape their future via Brexit. This was their chosen mode of “taking back control” of their lives, and they were evidently anxious to have that act properly respected. Even to the degree of voting against their historic Labour background.

So what I’m switching off – at least till some proper social and political science comes in – are the engines of leftist certainty. They were whirring mere hours after the result – pumping their pistons to reframe this utter thumping back into their labour-movement narrative.

A hand aloft, waving, over here ... Could you even remotely register this: the problem might be your smug certainty that the struggles and aspirations of a complex majority must be best expressed by a “party of labour”? Indeed, the SNP’s success story is precisely about breaking that natural assumption, and then building a record of manifest progress that creates a real “hegemony” (to use the comrades’ language). One of the earliest post-election surveys showed a remarkable consistency, across the social classes, in the SNP’s winning majority. That itself needs to be examined – but it is striking.

However, in the meantime, whenever I see some excitable rallying cry for, say, “networked socialism” (sisters and brothers, we haven’t tried that one yet) burbling up from the social media depths, I gently mute, and quietly bookmark for later. At this moment, it feels like much later.

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FACED with these two aversions, I have found at least two obvious consolations. At least until the known unknowns of the Alex Salmond trial start to unfurl, I’m going to enjoy the dignity and irrefutability of the SNP Governments indyref2 mandate.

Indeed, one of those “as-if independent” strategies we might deploy could well mean filtering whatever news comes from Westminster through the lens of Scottish self-determination. What’s that you say – they’re planning to do what with welfare, energy policy, immigration, broadcasting? Interesting. But what should we do? And how shall we execute our will and consensus? By which means, legislative or otherwise?

Detaching your mental circuits from the ideological and emotional charnel house of Johnson-Cummings-Gove, and all that jazz, might result in a strengthening of our own inner resolve—probably required, given the strategic extremism of the current Tory rulers. So keep holding BBC Scotland’s feet to the fire, support your indy-minded media with time and money, etc. The question of how we amass a solid indy majority, and the communication/engagement strategies for that, has its own tricky aspects, worthy of separate consideration. But right now, it’s good to be able to calmly and kindly proclaim our consensual Scottish virtues – especially in an embrace of our fellow No citizens, on their slow, steady wander Yes-wards, looking for a new home.

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My second consolation? Shutting down the podcasts has meant opening up the audiobooks. It’s a rare pleasure to stomp the streets not with a political seminar in your head, but a sibilantly voiced 20th-century classic slowly cascading through your ears.

Though I think I’ll need to keep trying. At the moment I’m listening to a lovely fantasy about an entertainment-obsessed, pleasure-distracted society, in which social inequality is encouraged and intrinsically tied to IQ. Soft intoxicants of all kinds are ready to hand, for when life gets too stressful or ethically challenged.

Yes, well done, Pat: why not choose Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World as your post-electoral medication? OK, OK: call it literary methadone. And let’s be hopeful, up here at least, that we can eventually return to political health. Have a restorative season, folks.