Michael Fry: We Scots need to become more aspirational again – like the Chinese

Though the number of cases may yet rise somewhat, it will reflect the spread of the disease since Christmas and not what course it is going to pursue from now on. Gradually the numbers will slacken and fall, till they come down to a level our society can cope with. Perhaps in a year’s time we will be wondering what all the fuss had been about.

If I’m wrong, the prospects will be grim. We must look forward to the severe degradation of the civilisation we have all been living in. The human race will need to start again somehow. Our necessary ignorance of the relevant conditions makes it useless to speculate further.

Still, some of my fellow columnists on The National are less cautious than me, and have been wondering aloud about the long-term future. Oddest of all are those who regard the virus as a herald of socialism, which in the rest of the world collapsed and died out 30 years ago.

My colleague George Kerevan recently wrote a piece on the digital economy in the online magazine Conter, which explored in some detail the results he expects from the pandemic impact on various advanced sectors. In each case he airily pointed up how the cause of socialism might be advanced.

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Another outspoken commentator, Kevin McKenna, has taken up the same theme. He argues that the present Government of Scotland is run by big business in pursuit of a neoliberal agenda. If only, say I. What most businessmen stress is that the links between them and Scottish Government have grown exceptionally tenuous. They complain indeed that they have few political contacts of any kind, with even the Tories being under the sway of Boris Johnson indifferent to anything but jovial prejudices about Scotland.

For Kevin, the test of his argument was how acceptable to the SNP the economic programme presented by Labour in their 2020 manifesto would have been, the Corbynista agenda rather than whatever Keir Starmer will say next time. As I recall, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon did in fact declare she could support large parts of it if a coalition, or something like it, were to be offered to her in a hung Parliament. But Jeremy Corbyn showed no interest, and the eventual outcome of the election made it impossible anyway.

Electoral campaigns quite often make people say, for tactical reasons, things they don’t really mean, and I could accept Sturgeon might have done this for the sake of moving on when her campaign was a bit bogged down. But she had also said similar things when under no pressure, for instance, during the TV debates for the last Scottish election.

She made clear then how she was so distrustful of capitalism that she would be prepared to resort to nationalisation to correct its harmful effects on particular industries and companies. I can’t think of any other western leader who would have ventured so far.

This did not remain just a matter of words. Nicola’s government has been involved in nationalisations, in the cases of the collapsing Ferguson shipyard at Port Glasgow, of Prestwick Airport and of the BiFab works at Burntisland. The action by the Scottish Government looked as if it foreshadowed a more general regime of official intervention in ailing industry. Unfortunately, each of these particular projects has been a flop, so we still have no means of judging when public ownership in Scotland might be a viable option.

Without that, what would a programme of socialism amount to in the Scotland of the 21st century? Every country in the world, practically, has been suffering from the acute crisis brought on by the coronavirus. Not a single one has identified socialism as the solution to it.

THE governments have accepted they should run up huge debts in order to keep their economies ticking over. But this is a matter of practical policy, not of systemic change. Once the worst is over, they will return to the capitalist system, sadder but wiser, carrying on with it much as ever.

Scotland has again hinted that it might in an ideal world quite like to try something else. There is evidence of its good intentions in the Scottish National Investment Bank, which has just got up and running, and indeed made its first investment in a quantum technology company, M Squared Lasers, of Glasgow.

What may distinguish this from all the other types of aid routinely offered by our Government is that the sum handed over is supposed to be patient capital – in other words, is not necessarily expected to start producing profits anytime soon, especially as it espouses virtuous social and environmental purposes as well.

So we are not just looking for grubby profits in the usual capitalist manner. Time will tell whether the fashionable verbiage amounts to anything more. At best, the assisted enterprise might open the way into a new economy for Scotland. At worst it may finish up by the middle of the century as just another public company supported by government money and so a little too complacent to make much impact in a global economy led by the Americans and the Chinese.

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I am sure the Americans will always be champions of capitalism, so deep is it embedded in their culture. The real wonder is how the Chinese have been casting off their socialist past, in both practice and principle.

Contrary to almost all other countries, for example, the government in Beijing last year started tightening its policy so as to bring spending into line with revenue. They don’t call it Thatcherism, but that’s what it is. We should see it as a mark of confidence and a statement of intent. China will not make the same mistakes it did a decade ago when its economic expansion saved the global economy but damaged its own internal balance. From now on, we must expect China to be cultivating a different garden from the rest of us, the garden perhaps of a secretive and reactionary mandarin, a world away from the dusty paddock of the American cowboy. If the Chinese could invent the coronavirus, they can certainly concoct this new commercial ideal.

Here is the kind of country that socialism can ultimately lead a people to, if they are a creative and aspirational people like the Chinese. Till a century ago the Scots were like that too, but meanwhile have settled for a regime of public-sector patronage, today underwritten as the practical policy of the SNP.

Our rulers like to call it equality and add a moral and philosophical gloss to sanctify it. Actually, I think this acceptance of provincial mediocrity is more likely to keep us exactly where we are than to open new prospects and high hopes.