History Rhymes Again.

I'd thought this week to look at why Scotland, as a small nation, would be better placed to manage the tribulations of a degenerating global economy than it would as part of an ill-fated UK, and why large, complex entities, whether countries or organisations, would increasingly begin to fail and fragment as the future unfolds. However, last week's acquisition by UKIP of a third Scottish seat in the European elections has put me in mind to divert briefly towards another subject: the lurch rightward seen both here and abroad. It is in part a consequence of the new reality that western nations must learn to operate in, and the worrying uptake of reactionary politics we're seeing shows that precious little learning is yet to be evidenced.

On the morning after the results in England's local elections were known I tweeted the following, only in part seriously:

“Looking a bit 1930s down there. Pray we're not seeing the birth of Nazi England.”

England is, of course, a very long way from the madness that overtook Germany in the early part of this century, nor is it likely to come anywhere near to it anytime soon - but the parallels are there, which is what I was thinking when I sent those two sentences off into the twitterverse. They're also parallels that some are unwilling or unable to see, since that one whimsical tweet got me blocked by one user, who also replied with a scathing “Get a grip!”. Oh well - such is the nature of conveying a thought into 140 characters. Nevertheless, it was retweeted a number of times by others, so some perhaps understood where I was coming from.

The similarity of our present moment in history to some of the events of the 1930s is noticeable, which is in essence all I was trying to say. This was the time of the Great Depression - the brutal economic malaise which followed the stock market crash of 1929 and was only eased a decade later when the world's factories went into overdrive to supply the combatants of the second world war. Very recently we experienced another financial crash, its origins – greed, overconfidence, lack of banking and stock market regulation – again similar to the causes of the 1929 crash. The decade of hardship that followed the '29 crash brought forth many of the things that are again coming to prominence now – soup kitchens, food banks, unemployment, increased homelessness and poverty, and sadly, a surge of bluster from the practitioners of ultra right-wing policy.

Then.....                           .....and now.

More to the point perhaps is that such practitioners are more likely to be listened to and taken seriously when times are hard. When the populace is experiencing economic pain, when jobs are growing scarce in lockstep with increases to the cost of living, desperate people become more likely to listen to voices they would have previously ignored and more willing to accept policies they would normally have rebelled against. The uncertainty such economic climates create breeds fear, and fear is a valuable tool for those with an agenda to push through. As is the tool of scapegoating – the setting up of a group or groups of individuals to take the blame for society's ills, either to serve as a distraction from those that are genuinely causing the problems or for whatever other motive those in power may have.

The actions of the UK's right-wing coalition government are light-years away from the horrors of a certain regime of the 1930s, but some of their techniques are from the same hymn sheet. The use of a difficult economy to allow the introduction of preferred policy is one example – in our case a program of austerity that penalises the poor and disadvantaged while preserving and enhancing the wealth of the few, many of whom are in fact the most culpable for the problems in the first place. And of course there is scapegoating - benefit recipients are demonised on a daily basis with accusations of fraud when in fact the cost to the treasury due to tax avoidance is many multiples of times higher.

So we come back to the rise of UKIP and others like it around the globe, dragging with them their reptilian-brained ideas and prejudices, right on time for the beginning of a new era of global adversity. Their brand of bigotry and narrow-minded isolationism cannot exist in a climate of prosperity and plenty, such as the times we are now leaving behind in latter half of the twentieth century. The future waiting in the wings, a future of declining wealth and energy availability, is the weakening body in which their type of cancer grows. As the new century progresses, they and their kind could bubble up out of the cesspit of humanity's darker ideas more often than most would like.

The marked difference in UKIP's popularity in England and Scotland shows quite clearly that we are a nation that overwhelmingly rejects their type of rhetoric; we must be careful that this remains so in a challenging future. That will be a task made all the more difficult while we remain chained to a system of government that is rapidly embracing policies and parties with ever more rightward leanings. Scotland is an outward-looking, European nation with a left-of-centre culture; to preserve it we must take charge of it and do our best to keep it nurtured in the hard years ahead. That is a task that will need careful management and fresh ideas in a world undergoing profound change.

I think we are up to it. We showed the world a new, alternative path before; we can do it again. How about the Scottish Enlightenment part two, starting September 2014?