A telling exchange from Tuesday night’s televised debate for the Scottish Parliament elections.
Malcolm Offord, businessman and Tory peer turned Reform’s leader north of the border, confronted Ross Greer, co-leader of the Scottish Greens and quite possibly the next deputy first minister of the devolved government. Reform is promising to cut voters’ taxes while the Greens are practically giddy at the prospect of raising them on ‘the super rich’, which would include Offord himself.
After detailing his background (Greenock tenement, local grammar, Edinburgh Uni) and his rocky entrepreneurial beginnings (he arrived in London 40 years ago, two grand in the red), Offord said:
‘Today, I own six houses, five cars, and six boats. In a 40-year business career, I’ve employed thousands of people and paid £45 million in tax. I don’t say this to boast, but to ask you this question, Mr Greer: in your Scotland, do you want more people like me or fewer people like me?’
To which Greer replied: ‘Fewer people like you.’
You know folk the world over, and especially Americans, claim to be Scottish? Here’s the definitive test. Which is being ridiculed by opponents and scolded by the media for making an almighty gaffe: Greer or Offord? If you answered Greer, I regret to inform you that you have not a trace of Jock in your DNA. (On the plus side, you’ll probably live beyond 55.)
Offord’s political opponents are capitalising on his blunder, or at least they think they are, with some snarkily sharing details of their much more modest assets. Twitter and the Scottish papers and even some of the London media are hooting at him, the out-of-touch populist, the man of the people with property portfolios. Yes, some of this is envy. Journalists are a poorly paid lot — the average salary for a print writer/reporter is £28,429 — and the resentment for a character like Offord, swimming through his vault of gold like Scrooge McDuck, is intense.
But it would be a mistake to chalk this up to nothing more than jealousy. The reaction is largely pavlovian, a learned response from generations of national myth-making and sentiment-passing-for-socialism, ‘we’re a’ Jock Tamson’s bairns’ meets the welfare state. In Scotland, ambition and aspiration are suspect, the airs and graces of the sorts who have ideas above their station: snobs, social climbers, the English.
This should not be mistaken for social democracy — even the Greens daren’t broach the raising of taxes on anyone beyond the dastardly rich — for it owes more to the presbytery than the proletariat. The Kirk’s pews lie near-empty today but the spirit of John Knox lives on: all are predestined to their lot in life, the elect to their public sector pensions and the reprobate to their DWP gruel, and anyone who rejects his place in favour of self-improvement and money-making is a spiv and an apostate.
Outsiders often ask what became of the land of Adam Smith, of the Scottish entrepreneurial spirit, of the plucky lad o’ pairts who parlayed scholastic gifts and hard work into fame and fortune the world over. The answer is that these things were products of an age and an idea, the age being the 19th century and the idea liberalism, and though the half-life of both continued to be felt in Scotland into the 20th century, they were eventually replaced by municipal socialism, trade unionism and post-war collectivism. The old gods had been replaced by new gods, and while those deities have since met their own demise, they too enjoy a life beyond their time.
Offord is hardly the first infidel to be decried for the heresy of achievement. He has merely inherited the anathema previously pronounced upon Andrew Neil, another son of the west coast who pulled himself up through grammar school (Paisley) and university (Glasgow) to make a conspicuous success of himself. During his time as editor-in-chief of the Scotsman, from the mid-nineties to the mid-noughties, Neil was the supreme bogeyman of the Scottish media industry and civil society more broadly.
This is blamed variously on his right-wing politics, his editorial priorities, his management style and his sacrilegious scrutinising of the devolution project, but none of these things scandalised opinion-formers as much as the man himself. He had left Scotland to make money and now he was back to make them make money. The vulgarity of the man.
Offord’s wealth won’t strike everyone as vulgar. The sort of people already voting for him and those who are Reform-curious admire self-made men and regard the accumulation of wealth as a reward for effort, ability and risk-taking, rather than a marker of iniquity. This exasperates progressive politicians, journalists and academics, who regard such voters, few of whom enjoy anything like Offord’s riches, as hopeless chumps bewitched by bigotry and culture war trivia. When the masses reject the political status quo, it’s called populism. When they reject the economic status quo, it’s called democracy.
Most people hate the rich because the middle income can no longer afford the lifestyle of their parents or grandparents
There is a tension, of course, between democracy and excellence. Democracy preaches equality of input but excellence distributes outcomes unevenly, which is why democracy is so often a vehicle for punishing excellence or distorting its allocation of rewards. This doesn’t force us to choose between democracy and excellence but forces us to consider the relationship of the two and the dangers inherent in allowing either to dominate the other.
Would there be quite so much resentment for Malcolm Offord’s sizeable wealth if the ability of most citizens to accumulate much more modest wealth hadn’t been choked off by house prices, inflation, taxes and a low-growth economy? Most people don’t hate the rich because the rich can afford the lifestyle of an Emirati prince but because the middle income can no longer afford the lifestyle of their parents or grandparents.
Resolving this tension is the business of good government but good government is impossible in Scotland and will continue to be for as long as achievement is regarded as a moral defect, an act of national betrayal, and an uppity usurpation of an unwritten code. If Malcolm Offord’s success is a vote-loser, if we really do want fewer people like him, the only future for Scotland is sinking deeper into the morass of mediocrity.
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