One thing we should be doing on the left in England, and we're not really doing at all, is like studying what's happened in Scotland over the past not just 30 years, but 50 years.

Because basically what's happened is it's gone from a country that was a majority Tory.

I mean, people forget this now.

Most Scotland returned a Tory majority in the 50s to one in which not radical socialism, but at least a cosmopolitan social

democracy is so much the normative common sense that you can present yourself as like anti,

you can accuse your opponents of being anti-Scottish because they're racist and they're neoliberal

or they're neoliberal.

And that has what the SMP is sort of done.

And we really need to be studying how that's happened and seeing, thinking about how we could replicate it.

But what I would say is, as I just said, that's, that's taken 50 years to get to that

point, more than 50 years.

And it's taken 50 years when the left and the

kind of moderate, you know, sort of nationalist movement in Scotland have had the huge political

advantage of a succession of aggressively neoliberal Tory governments who just, who absolutely hated

them for almost unaccountable reasons, you know, or just sort of

sadistically hated them. So, you know, Thatcher deciding to impose the bold tax on Scotland a year

before England was just, you know, it was a permanent gift, you know, to the, to the Scottish left,

you know, which is kept on giving. So I think we would have to sort of study

that. And I think it is, and I can't give a sort of quick answer, but I would say it's a, it does

suggest that there is a value to a long-term project of building a popular majority. I think we should

be studying, you know, we should be studying what's happened in

Scotland, because it is, it is a sort of, it is a case study on our own doorstep of an entire

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