I started my blog, thinking liberal.co.uk, in 2011, when political blogs were quite popular. I used Facebook and Twitter to find interested readers. That was quite popular then. My blog had quite a reasonable impact – people mentioned it to me at party conferences. I interacted with people on both Facebook and Twitter. That was a brief moment of glory – it has since faded into something followed by a few friends and a small band of others whom I have picked up on the way. I don’t know how many, as the statistics seem to be dominated by bots and fakes; even the rather limited mailing list seems to have quite a few dodgy items.
Facebook and Twitter are now well down the path of enshittification, a process first described by Cory Doctorow in 2022. An online service starts by favouring the interests of customers and people to the point of lunacy: everything is free and under your control. Gradually the process of monetisation takes over until customers (and staff) are left with a very weak product, but little alternative because these have been squashed through network effects. Facebook made it harder and harder to use for the distribution of political thought. It was attracting too much controversy (mainly because of its use to promote conspiracy theories and fake news), and the simplest solution was to block all of it, not just the bad stuff. My feed is now full of things I never asked for, driven by sponsorship or an algorithm. Posts from a few friends show up from time to time (to which I need to respond if I am to have any chance of seeing them regularly) – but blink and you miss it. The feed refreshes and the post vanishes. You can find things by searching for the poster, but it’s hard work. For a while I could mitigate some of the problems by creating a Facebook page for my blog, which if people “liked”, they were much more likely to pick up posts on their feed. When I most recently visited this page, however, I was shocked. It was full of junk content put there by algorithm. I had expected to see a sequence of the posts I had made. It has been completely enshittified. To make it work I would need to buy promotion.
Twitter, meanwhile, made it harder for me to post links to my blog long before Elon Musk decided to trash it. Tools that allowed an automatic post ceased to work. I have long since ceased to post, though my account still exists, as some of the notifications are interesting, though even this has tailed off.
Then along came Substack – a blog distribution system. This has proved very popular amongst political bloggers, and so I thought I would give it a try. I’m not entirely sure how it works, or how far along the path of enshittification it has travelled – though the journey has clearly started. One particular feature, though, I will not use: paid subscriptions. I write the blog for my personal pleasure, and because I find that writing helps clarify thought. It is irregular, and I have long since abandoned any idea that it can be seriously influential. I don’t need the money. I suspect that subscriptions are an important part of the Substack business model, though, so this may not be sustainable in the long term. We’ll see.
My plan is to publish all my future posts here. The WordPress website will keep going – this at least is pretty much under my control, and acts as a record of my writing. Email subscription there seems to be costless and easy, so I will keep going with it; Substack will simply been an alternative channel. I may drop the Facebook page – though it does seem to be pretty costless to keep going. I will also keep posting on my main Facebook feed, as I know a few of my friends are picking it up. I will probably stop the silly AI pictures (unless people say they like them). I put these on to improve the chances of the Facebook algorithms favouring them – and to avoid the copyright issues arising from using real pictures.
So let’s see what happens!
You should be able to find my Substack page and subscribe here.
Copilot again. This is too optimistic for the current state of the SNP, but climbing a high mountain in shorts may be an apt metaphor
The last in my post-election survey of Britain’s main political parties concludes with the Scottish National Party. Alongside the Conservatives, it was a big loser in the general election, being reduced from 48 seats to just 9. But they still control the Scottish parliament, with no election until 2026. They are down but definitely not out. But they will need to do some should searching if they are not to sink back further.
Firstly, though, I must offer a health warning. I am not Scottish, and I have few political contacts north of the border. I am not plugged into politics there in the way that I am in England. So this is very much an outsider’s view. Still outsiders’ views can have value – and Scottish politics does impact English politics through our shared nation.
The SNP’s fall over the last two years has been dramatic. Until 2023, the party was sweeping all before it in Scotland. Nicola Sturgeon, its leader, was one of the most experienced in British politics, and presented a calm, reasonable face to the party – she was a gifted political communicator. And yet behind this calm exterior, all was clearly not well. The performance of the Scottish government under SNP control was lacklustre, on such basic issues as health, education and law and order (Glasgow having an astonishingly bad record on drugs). Ms Sturgeon presented a much more credible public face during the covid pandemic than England’s Boris Johnson – but Scotland’s results were no better. The SNP seemed too interested in politics and not enough in administration. It preferred to stay close with interest groups, rather than undertake tough reforms – apart from a botched reform of Scotland’s police. The reforms that there were centralised power to the Edinburgh government. Its Green coalition partners proved highly ideological and spent little effort engaging with the public. The Scottish government then took on a reform of gender recognition laws that was aligned with the leftwing-liberal consensus, but poorly aligned with general public opinion. This was heavily promoted by the Greens, but actually drew support from across the political spectrum. Public protests and celebrity opposition (notably from Scottish author J.K. Rowling) seemed to take the Edinburgh elite by surprise. When the UK government (led by the very unpopular and chaotic conservatives) blocked the law, it won rare approval north of the border. Meanwhile the party’s goal of Scottish independence remained a long way off, as the UK government refused a second referendum.
And then the incestuous goings on in the SNP’s internal management were exposed in a police investigation into possible misuse of funds. Ms Sturgeon retired as leader just before the storm broke. The alleged abuse (using funds donated to support an independence referendum for general electioneering) was not necessarily all that serious – and its illegality has yet to be resolved. But the scandal exposed very unhealthy governance. The party’s reputation was in tatters, not helped by the selection of a hapless new leader, Hamza Youssef , who seemed to expose the party’s lack of depth in talent. Was this party really capable of running an independent country? And that led on to the collapse in SNP vote and representation in the UK parliament. Labour surged in Scotland.
But all is not lost. The goings on at the SNP have not had much impact on support for Scottish independence, which runs at about 40%. This is not enough to win a referendum, but it is weighted towards younger voters, promising a majority in future. And the SNP has no serious rival in its leadership of the independence movement. The attempt by former leader (the late) Alec Salmond to establish a rival party was a dismal failure. Meanwhile Labour’s hapless start in government has wounded its main rival for votes north of the border, while the Conservatives remain weak, and Reform UK lacks the punch it has in England or Wales.
But the party must pose deep questions to itself. Politics has changed. The Scottish political elite has converged around a social democratic consensus. A big inspiration seems to have been the social democratic governments in Scandinavia – countries which, after all, are comparable in size to Scotland. While social democrats have been in retreat in England (and Wales), they assumed Scotland was different. The country produced a Remain majority in the EU referendum after all. But the whole world is moving against the social democratic – liberal – left consensus, including in Scandinavia. Immigration has become a top political issue. Gender-critical views, rejecting the extremes represented by Scotland’s self-identification laws, are mainstream. People are becoming wary of minority identity politics. A rising dependency ratio means that people question state benefits. Tax rises are resisted. Scotland can no more escape these trends than Scandinavia, where populist parties have been doing well. And more conservative views within the SNP, represented by leadership challenger Kate Forbes, are becoming more visible. Indeed Ms Forbes is clearly the most dynamic of the party’s senior politicians.
The question for the SNP is how far it follows these trends, and adopts Ireland as its model rather than Denmark or Sweden. Low taxes and a weaker welfare state are core to politics there. So far it has managed to scoop up the anti-establishment vote, by virtue of its support for independence, alongside more mainstream supporters. This could easily fray, with the Conservatives and/or Reform picking up support.
The current leader, John Swinney, is one of the party’s elders, and looks like a stopgap before the party takes its next bold steps. He will doubtless try to pick up disillusioned Labour voters while ignoring the conservative threat. I don’t think this will work, although it could lead to a messy result at the next Scottish election, whereby no majority can be formed without either the SNP or the conservatives.
The SNP would surely be better off if Mr Swinney stepped back, and let Ms Forbes take the reins. The left is in retreat, and the SNP needs to recognise that.
The human brain seems hard-wired to pessimism – often called realism. There is indeed much to gloomy or worried about at the moment. Quite a bit of it is talked up here: don’t get me started on the subject of economic growth! But it is always helpful to challenge oneself, and in this season of good cheer, I thought I would give it a go. So here are five things that give me hope.
1. Solar Power
Solar panels are a truly transformative technology, in ways that we are only slowly starting to appreciate. It is a distributed technology, which requires little infrastructure of itself (though of course to transport its output large distances does require substantial investment). It doesn’t require much maintenance once installed, as there are few moving parts. It reduces marginal costs of energy to very little. And advances in battery technology make its one major drawback – that it only produces when there is sunlight – much more manageable. It is an economic proposition that fossils fuels are finding it harder and harder to compete with. Thanks to these technologies China is already ahead of its decarbonisation goals. It is indeed thanks to China that the technological advance has been so swift. It is the underlying economics of solar power that makes decarbonisation a feasible proposition, and one that is developing its own momentum. Wind power has some of the same features, but many more difficulties. We should not be placing tariffs on Chinese exports of solar panels or batteries, but saying “thank you very much” and importing all that they can produce. Domestic production will catch up in time.
2. The bad guys can’t deliver
Our modern era is sometimes compared to the 1920s and 1930s, which saw the rise of the Nazis, Fascists and Stalinism. The rise of the far-right today is often compared to these movements. But the context is very different. Then there was much unused economic potential, thanks to misguided (as we now see it) conservative economic policies, and industrial technology that provided a ready and highly productive use for relatively unskilled labour – and much untapped demand for that technology’s output. Fascist regimes could readily produce dramatic economic results by unleashing infrastructure investment programmes – and even by building up armed forces. This would come to be called “Keynesian economics”. The results gave these regimes popular legitimacy. This was especially dramatic in Germany and helped Naziism to become an embedded ideology. No such opportunity exists in the 2020s. Advanced technology does not produce lots of new jobs – or not of the right sort. Labour markets are already quite tight, so that expansionary fiscal policies, and excessive military spending, produces inflation, and not lower unemployment. Instead, the policies of today’s near-fascists result in cronyism, corruption, inflation and general underperformance. That undermines their legitimacy.
Playing for the biggest fall is Vladimir Putin’s Russia, however much he manages to achieve in Ukraine. Russia has a massive demographic problem, with a very low birth rate. The war is making that much worse. Mr Putin’s obsession with pollical control is resulting in cronyism and the suppression of initiative: this is not good for economic efficiency – while sanctions arising from the war reduce Russia’s options. Instead, Russia is heavily dependent on hydrocarbons. See 1. above. Events in Syria show how quickly an excessively tyrannical regime can crumble – and shares elements with the fall of the Soviet regime.
I hesitate to call China evil in the same way as Russia. Its leadership is much more able, and recognises the need to keep corruption in check and for economic efficiency. It has some impressive achievements to its name (see 1. above). But it remains an imperialist power, and actively tries to undermine the West. It too has a demographic problem, and it is finding that an obsession with political control comes with increasing costs. It does not present a shining alternative to western ways, as it once thought it did.
3. Information technology
I am thoroughly sick of the hyping of artificial intelligence (AI), and the way it is crowbarred into any topic you care to name. But it is part of an astonishing development of information technology that will transform our lives in ways that we barely understand. I don’t think it translates into increased productivity in the smooth way that some talk of. As with most technologies it will have to change the way we work and think about things before it will have a real impact. But it should improve economic efficiency and human wellbeing in the longer run. My hope is that it will make some of the public service challenges developed countries face more tractable, reducing the pressure on government finances.
4. The developing world
A lot of the progress made by the developed world in the later part of the 20th Century and the first years of the 21st comes down to the opportunities provided by less developed countries in East Asia. As these countries developed their economies, they presented trading opportunities and gains from trade with the developed world. This has run its course, and has actually gone into reverse, as East Asian economies converge with developed world ones (and in some cases have joined that developed world), reducing trade gains (a process which, of course, has been enormously beneficial to those East Asian economies). This has been a regular hobby horse of mine as this piece of basic economics is so widely under-appreciated, even by economists who should know better. And yet there remain two large areas of the less developed world which have yet to advance properly: South Asia (notably India) and Africa. Might not the development of these economies provide further opportunities for mutual benefit?
This is far from straightforward. The East Asian model saw the transfer of workers from subsistence agriculture to manufacturing industry, mass producing consumer products for export, in exchange for a different suite of products and services from the developed world. That model is surely done. Manufacturing technology is so advanced that there are too few jobs at stake, and the developed world’s appetite for “stuff” is surely approaching saturation – although we should remember that potential markets include those East Asian economies, including China, too. To advance, the South Asian and African economies must move the workforce out of agriculture. India has made important strides, but has yet to seriously tackle agricultural reform. But what should surplus agricultural workers do? Here I’m struggling a bit, but I’m sure that 1. and 3. above are part of the solution. It may be that their development will be less dependent on exports. At the moment, their biggest economic impact arises from the export of labour though emigration, affecting Europe and the Middle East in particular (also America, where immigrants also come from Latin America – which is less of a development opportunity). This has mutual benefits but the stresses in host countries are showing, and this is not sustainable in the longer term.
Of course this effort must be led by the developing countries themselves, and not as part of a paternalist relationship with the developed world – as the East Asian progress owed little to the West except in the cold, hard mutual benefits of trade. There is a lot of baggage here but it is in the developed countries’ interests if they are to take their people out of poverty.
5. Liberal values become world values
I’m on fairly safe ground on the first three of my choices; number 4 is a bit shaky. This one is a bit of outrageous optimism. The later 20th Century was a post-colonialist age. Colonialism by the big European powers was pretty much over, though colonialism in Asia by Russia and China lived on. But the pall of colonialism hung over those European powers and still dominated political narratives. Newly independent nations blamed all their ills on their colonial past, and sought compensation in some form or other from the former colonists. They adapted the narrative somewhat to put pressure on the USA too as some sort of “neo-imperialist”. Meanwhile the developed world – the Western powers, consisting largely of those ex-colonisers, espoused liberal values as being universal ones, and criticised others when they fell short. These two narratives got tangled up, and many less developed countries accused developed countries of imposing alien values to their own advantage, and accused them of racism on top.
This all has another narrative: the West remained extremely powerful after decolonisation, and even more so once it had seen off its Communist rival the Soviet Union. Developing countries needed to plead their case to get aid and assistance; the Western powers never let their liberal values get in the way of self-interest, leading to accusations of hypocrisy that were often justified. Then some of these developing nations became more powerful. China worked its way into superpower status (in large part through trade with the West); other countries, like Iran, became more assertive. The anti-liberal movement gained momentum. Liberal values were Western values, and were a new way of promoting a kind of moral colonialism.
The result was ugly. The number of oppressive regimes grew. Medium-sized powers felt free to interfere in regional affairs, allowing a series of awful civil wars to take root. Western liberals feel beleaguered. And they are criticised at home, by conservatives who are fed up with what they see as the trashing of their countries’ history and culture; and by the left who promote anti-colonialist attitudes, and indulge in identity policies among minority communities that would not be tolerated by those minorities if they were in the majority..
And yet the West’s critics still look to the West for leadership in such matters as combatting climate change. “It’s your fault,” they suggest, “so you fix it.” China, by now the biggest contributor to world pollution and climate change sits idly by, though at least they are developing post-carbon technologies – see 1. above. India persists in its victim mentality, apparently unable to see that with a billion people they can’t just complain from the sidelines.
But this is breaking down. The rise of the populists, and especially Donald Trump, means that the West is retreating from its leadership role. And yet the West still looks to be one of the best places to live in the world. Few would say that of China – and especially if you don’t happen to be Han Chinese. And problems such as climate change change and civil wars rage on, with less developed countries as their main victims. This is creating something of a leadership vacuum, which the less developed countries need to fill. And their favoured narratives are losing traction. East Asian countries that have transitioned to developed status did this largely through their own efforts, assisted by free trade with the developed world. They had to move on from the victim mentality and take on proper agency of their own. It is not that African and south Asian countries are necessarily wrong about the damage of colonialism and slavery, but that their obsessing about this is no basis for building a prosperous future.
Meanwhile Western values and the moral high ground don’t look so bad. Capitalism has proved to be the only viable route to prosperity. The cynicism of non-Western powers, like China and Iran, to say nothing of Russia, is very evident, and has hardly promoted world peace. They are not creating great places to live (even if China’s progress must be acknowledged, it compares unfavourably with places like Taiwan). China may be free of Western hypocrisy, but that just leaves its naked self-interest unvarnished – as it develops its very own brand of hypocrisy. Western values really do have a universal application.
This would be good news because if we see a better quality of leadership from non-Western countries, then global problems will become more tractable. They will push forward harder on de-carbonisation, starting at home; they will be less free about arming rebel movements among their neighbours. A bit more humility on the part of Western countries would certainly be appropriate, but people being what they are, that will not be forthcoming.
When reflecting on this I am reminded of one of the courses I studied in my final year at Cambridge, when I was studying history. It was on the philosophy of international relations and led by Professor Harry Hinsley. How do you achieve peaceful international relations? One line of argument suggested that you needed a dominant power to act as a sort of policeman. Another suggested that you needed an empowered supra-national authority. The first is an uninviting prospect, the second is clearly infeasible, and leads to the problem of how that world authority is to be accountable. A more hopeful idea is that if the world was divided into autonomous nations, whose sovereignty ended at agreed borders, then those countries would learn to live with each other out of self-interest. This was in effect the system that Europe developed after the Seven Years War in 1763. Europe didn’t banish war, but the periods of peaceful relations lasted longer than before. The problem was that wars become harder to stop once started. I would like to think that the medium-sized nations of the world – Turkey, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Israel in particular – will start to learn this lesson. Also that the newer great powers – China and India – will realise that they must play a bigger leadership role if world problems are to be tractable. And that neo-imperialist powers, Russia and to a lesser extent China, realise the futility of their enterprise and start to focus on the real needs of their populations. None of this necessarily involves embracing liberalism – but somehow I feel that it leads there.
Hope springs eternal
Good news tends to happen slowly and it isn’t newsworthy. But there is no denying that the world is entering a rough patch. Economic growth has run out of road in the developed world – as at last even the FT’s Martin Wolf is starting to appreciate. He says that this is causing the current political dysfunction, but it’s worse than that. The US is widely admired for delivering the best growth story, and yet the dysfunction is as bad there as anywhere. Actually the changes required to generate growth are as painful as trying to live without it. But the march of technology and scientific understanding goes on – and we don’t need conventionally understood economic growth for the world to become a better place. Think of a place where people don’t consume any more on average in developed countries (though with a more equal distribution), but who live longer, healthier lives, and where there is much less crime. A world where greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are steadily being reduced, where extreme poverty is being pushed back, and which is not so blighted by armed conflict. Apart from the beating back of poverty, none of these things needs economic growth – and the growth required to combat poverty is required only in less developed countries. This advance can be ecologically sustainable. I have not lost hope that the world can get much closer to such a vision.
