Politics is complicated. Successive governments, all over the globe, try and often fail to solve the social problems for which they are voted in. Whether these problems are economic or moral, they aren’t often easy to solve. One of the biggest reasons for this in recent times is the failure of ideology to be evidence-based. In the UK, the Conservatives famously championed a technique of ‘trickle down’ economics, in which they theorised the rich few in society would benefit the rest via their own spending within the society. It was an appealing idea, but of course rich people don’t just up the amount of bread they buy relative to their wealth; their extra capital is sitting in bank accounts, investment bonds, or being spent on rare or luxury items. A diamond may be many thousands of times the price of a loaf of bread, but it doesn’t create many thousands of times the tax revenue and employment value of the bread. So trickle down economics doesn’t work in theory or, as the last few decades show, in practice. The gap between the rich and poor grew.

 

Many political entities, including the Conservatives, still lust after this disproven ‘the rich will naturally save the day’ philosophy. Of course they do: ideology is not evidence-based. This ideological problem isn’t what I would call the snake oil of politics, though. Ideologies are reasonably clear policy bases which we can indulge or ignore, whether they are accurate or not.

 

The real snake oil salesmen are those claiming that there is a simple, singular solution to our societies’ problems. In modern politics this comes almost unanimously in the form of ideological single issue parties. But whilst single-issue parties like the Green’s have moved from a single base of environmentalism to a clear and reasonably far-left social justice party (with all the flaws that go with it), the small parties built on nationalism have stuck steadfastly to the basic ideology: that nationalism/isolation will save society.

 

There are of course two very different yet equally relevant examples of this snake oil in British politics: the SNP and UKIP. Interestingly, people seem to want to ignore the similarities between these parties, which shows just how good one or the other is at selling its snake oil as something more than nationalism. They certainly aren’t the same party in terms of practical policies, but their ideologies and tactics are remarkably similar.

 

To the SNP first. They were most visible in 2014 thanks to the Scottish Independence Referendum, gaining what seems like limitless popularity in Scotland. Their arguments during 2014, perhaps understandably, focused entirely on classic nationalist lines. In many instances they dropped the arguments altogether in favour of a post-modern grasping and rewiring of the independence debate as ‘positive’ versus ‘negative’. The better together campaign were asking for a dull, status quo ‘no’, whilst the yes campaign were hoping for an exciting, new ‘yes’. They benefited from the wording of the referendum, in essence. Had it instead been worded as ‘Should Scotland remain as a part of the United Kingdom?’ then the majority of the most effective tactics would have favoured the other side, and arguably would have led to a greater victory against isolation.

 

It is the instances when the SNP did use arguments, rather than simple shouts of positivity, that is of interest here though. These arguments were of the strongest nationalist types. They asked why shouldn’t ‘Scottish people’ rule Scotland, emotively played on words such as independence (independence conjures images of freedom, which inaccurately paints a no vote as illiberal), and created an ‘us vs. them’ argument between Scotland and South England. Somehow they even managed to demonise the Southern English in isolation, equating them with the bankers after the economic crash. Conveniently forgetting that some bankers are Scottish, and also that they didn’t want Scotland and Northern England to be an independent country: they just wanted Scotland. Their own tactic here showed the arbitrary nature of line drawing which nationalism always consists of.

 

In general, the reductive argument was very simply that regardless of the benefits of an economic and social union between the different regions of the UK, Scottish people would be better off without it, as Scottish people were different enough to the rest. That is, Scottish people in the small communities of Skye and Orkney, of the cosmopolitan Glasgow alternative cultures, of the sophisticated Edinburgh, the digital Dundee and even the wealthy, oil-rich Aberdeen. All of Scotland – according to the nationalists – are different, equally different, to all the rest of the UK. There was no credence that different areas of Scotland were more similar to their counterparts in the wider UK, instead the nationalists made the argument that all Scottish people were the same in being different, but also better off without those ‘other’ British people.

 

Indeed the SNP sold this solution to the ills of Scottish society on the basis that it would improve social justice as well as the economy, yet it did so based on nothing but drawing an imaginary, historical line just below the borders region.

 

Nationalists in Scotland are very rarely caught explicitly saying that their own nation or race are ‘better’ than anyone else, so we can’t be 100% certain that the nationalists noticed this reductive nature of their arguments. But the case of nationalism, which is nothing but arbitrary line drawing, must make arguments like this. Here’s why:

 

If nationalists do not deeply believe that their own nation is better than others, or the people in it are better or of a different kind, then the political policies they could formulate would be greatly limited. Indeed it wouldn’t be nationalism. If one simply believed that a country, such as Scotland, would be better run as an independent because it was smaller, for example, then this lone factor could be easily balanced out by the economic security, employment advantages, export benefits, etc. Within a reasonably successful country like the UK it would take quite some coincidence to line up every relevant area of potential independence as an advantage on behalf of independence, as the SNP claimed. Similarly, they are arguing for the independence of the very culturally varied Scotland as a whole – not the one or two areas that are exactly the same. It’s a nationalistic line drawing exercise to argue that Scotland, not regions of it or regions of England too, should be independent. Financially it would have been more sensible to argue Aberdeen should be independent, thus not carrying the less financially able areas, and culturally more sensible to argue that Glasgow and Dundee should be independent, not the less culturally similar areas. These were not the arguments made.

 

The proof is also in the pudding. The SNP didn’t ignore or concede any significant areas as losses under independence: they argued that Scotland would be immediately and forever wealthier, more just, more peaceful, happier and more respected as an individual nation. This is snake oil of the highest degree, claiming that such an arbitrary decision, based on nothing but a line drawing exercise could cure society of its ills. Even a sympathetic rational analysis would note that the case for independence should be weaker or stronger at different times, depending on the annual economic outlook, etc. The fact that the SNP have been campaigning for this for decades, with no substantial difference in arguments, tells us something important.

 

Nationalism – whether it be as extreme as isolating an entire country or not – is not a cure-all for the ills of social deprivation or economic collapse. There is no evidence to suggest it is, and if you’re being sold this idea, you’re being sold snake oil. After losing the referendum, large swathes of Yes voters are forecasted to be newly voting SNP in May’s general election despite a lack of movement in their policies from before the referendum; the political snake-oil market is booming.

 

 

UKIP

 

Once the problem of nationalistic snake-oil is explained, it’s not hard to see how UKIP fit in. UKIP is an entire party whose ideology is that the UK should remove itself from the European Union – regardless of the effect. Again, UKIP don’t say the ‘regardless of its effect’ part, you have to dig at the logic. They have not said ‘we will stay in the EU if…’, rather they believe that whatever happens, they will leave the EU. Theoretically, even if the EU become a perfectly organised and fair organisation tomorrow, UKIP would still oppose it else it wouldn’t be the ideology of UKIP. Historically we would call this a pressure group – pressuring public opinion on one subject – but in modern society, we allow it’s charm as an ‘anti-politics’ party to  somehow confuse us.

 

This certainly isn’t the only evidence of UKIP’s nationalistic tendencies. Their views on immigration are supported by a primitive form of reason: they believe that people born/raised in the UK should have first choice on British jobs. As primitive as this sounds, it might make some sense: immigrants, perhaps, are more likely to be willing/able to move countries to find jobs, whereas British people in Britain may be less willing/able. Thus there’s a line of argument that makes sense. However UKIP go way beyond this: claiming everything from increased immigration negatively affects global warming (of course a blatant lie – the clue is in the word global, not national), it has made more traffic which in turn makes their leader late for conferences, and that decreasing immigration significantly will improve our economic situation.

 

This last argument – that immigration causes economic problems – is the most rational. Yet it still doesn’t make a great deal of sense. It might improve things slightly, but it would primarily reduce a small strain on the welfare state. The amount spent on the welfare state – including pensions and all – only measures 25% of the countries economy. Around 5% of the people on working benefits – working benefits itself is only a percentage within the 25% – are non-British, which is a tiny figure compared to either the amount of debt in the country or the other individual factors in our economic weakness (for instance, tax avoidance among big business, or the almost total elimination of tax for non-domiciles in the country). Such insignificant figures also don’t take into account the economic benefits of immigration. It arbitrarily picks out one small issue from the huge spectrum of political issues, and then bases a solution for the whole political spectrum on this alone.

 

This is scare-mongering and snake-oil selling combined. Not only is it bizarre to begin demonising based on those same poor nationalistic arguments which we heard earlier, but it’s also complete nonsense. In science, we see things like alchemists all but extinct because it’s logically invalid; people in scientific disciplines are trained to spot nonsense. Yet in politics we seem to be slaves to our basic instincts, flocking to words like ‘immigration’ or the calling out of our national labels. It seems that evidence holds little sway. Sure, we can’t make every decision in politics based on evidence alone, but when we can disprove ideas by using it we certainly should. Yet we indulge nationalism all the time, in a way that doesn’t speak well for our ability to understand either politics or arguments.

 

Given that we all have to study history at school, and with it the mistakes of nationalism which the world made in the 1910’s/30’s/40’s, it’s quite something that UKIP now poll as the UK’s third biggest political party, whilst the SNP look set to gain close to 100% of the parliamentary seats in Scotland. It’s unlikely that either of these nationalist tribes – even if they both gain mass success – will lead the UK to war any time soon. But it is concerning that we appear to be seeing a generation of voters who don’t know the risks and arbitrary nature of nationalism, or how to spot subjective line-drawing as a political tactic to solve important social problems. Problems that grow when we focus on illegitimate snake oil rather than rational attempts to solve them. We’re surely better than this, aren’t we? We’re certain to find out in May.

As the Scottish independence referendum came to a close in 2014, the high turnout suggested to the world that Scotland had found a political awakening. Yet the battle was mostly not one of reasoned political debate, igniting passion and interest, but of successfully framing the debate in terms of ‘positive and new’ versus ‘negative and old’. People turned out in high numbers because we had divided the country into teams of individuals who would be responsible for failure had they not turned out. This was far from an act of mass political involvement, but representative of a country that had been successfully divided – a divide that remains to this day.

 

Ironically the SNP, who claimed the ‘positive and new’ mantle despite being the Scottish government’s elite, were the ones to use this old political tactic of framing the debate like a PR company rather than having the debate. What at any other vote would have been pointed out as ‘spin’, was labelled ‘passion’ because, the mainstream media didn’t want to be seen as bigots against us poor Scottish people (they are after all the Scottish-NP). The SNP gave the occasional lip-service to economics, or EU membership, yet they primarily devoted time to this ‘positive change’ spin. Championing a yes vote for them meant ignoring debate in favour of positivity, newness, difference and thus hope. In short, all those tired tactics that normal political parties employ, which the SNP seek to be the alternative to.

 

The fact that the Better Together campaign focused on the almost certainly negative repercussions of independence – primarily the huge risk to the economy and the real welfare of people in Scotland – rather than playing this political game of building positive, iconic images, meant the vote was in the end too close to call until the final few days. It was highly ironic, not to mention telling, that the swing toward the traditional political spin of the yes campaign looked to be conclusive until the likes of Gordon Brown began playing the ‘inspirational’ and ‘hope’ cards in favour of the union. The entire campaign was fought for on the grounds that Westminster was old and tired politics that we Scots did not relate to, yet we seemed only to relate to these old and tired politics when it came to the biggest of Scottish votes in years. We labelled criticism and reason as ‘negativity’ and fell hook line and sinker for that spin (the thing we think we hate).

 

The vote is now long past, yet the scars remain. The polls so far suggest that the general election will see the SNP make huge gains in Scotland, after they picked up huge numbers of new party members in the midst of their independence failures. Further irony is the great success they see this failure-begetting-support as. Yet more traditional political spin, and once more it’s working. They haven’t changed their basic policies to pick up this support, in fact the only change they’ve really made is cosmetic: their leader. Behead the old, failed leader, and elect a new, positive one. That spin hasn’t been unearthed either. But Scottish society is now so divided that many of the people on the yes team no longer care about their personal feelings on political issues, so much as they care about atoning for their loss last September. Of course they see it not as the sour grapes or desperate logic-vacant nationalism that it probably is, but as positive, hopeful voting. Of course they do. This is new politics, remember. Old political spin is labelled as new, here.

 

Many of these voters may have previously been pro-independence, but preferred Labour in terms of actual policy, but that feeling has now gone. The SNP lost the vote, but for 45% of people they successfully framed Westminster, the English and everything other than the SNP as old and tired politics. Policy itself no longer matters; they are now New Team Scotland. Who cares about social justice or the economy here and now, they want their team to be fighting for silverware – they want another referendum so as they can have another shot at glory. Or hope, or positivity, or whatever else Nicola Sturgeon will pull out of her positivity thesaurus.

 

How are the SNP to blame for closing down political debate like this, you might ask. Surely they are doing nothing wrong by simply pandering to this opinion? Well, even if you ignore the self-serving and deceitful spin I’ve so far mentioned, there are still two huge reasons to lay blame at the door of the SNP.

 

Firstly they refuse to rule out further pushes for referendums on independence, despite at least 55% of the country voting against it (at its lowest period) and it now being an unrealistic proposition for a good few terms of parliament yet. To rule it out would be a responsible and honest act, one that would allow people to start focusing on SNP policies rather on independence. But to do so would mean the fractured population no longer divided itself in a way that supported the SNP winning hordes of new seats. Traditional, apparently tired, political manoeuvring.

 

Secondly it’s because they refuse to rule out supporting a Labour government in a coalition, despite knowing that they would never commit such political suicide as it would ruin their ‘fresh, new politics’ spin. Support for the SNP would drop after being part of a coalition, but it will grow with a UK Tory government; providing yet more ammunition for their argument that Scotland never gets the government it votes for. So they will not rule out an informal coalition while people are voting, yet never agree to one after voting is over. More of that political deception and points scoring that they represent the best example of, but also the self-proclaimed alternative to.

 

There’s a lot of irony in this story, but I’ve yet to get to the most depressing part. As I came to my decision to vote no last year, I tried to second guess my opinions by considering the counter-arguments. The best reason for supporting independence, I thought, was because an independent Scotland would be a leftist Scotland. The Tories are almost non-existent up here, and UKIP certainly won’t get much of a look in. The more I thought about it, though, the less important this reason seemed. Partly because I’m an ethicist and I agree with the morality of ‘the Stewart Lee argument’, in which he noted a leftist Scotland would leave the much larger population of the rest of the UK at the mercy of the Tories. Like fencing off an environmental community, and allowing the rest of the world to burn increasing levels of fossil fuels with the lessened opposition. But partly also because the SNP aren’t as progressive as people think. As Tory support in Scotland has dropped, SNP support has grown. It’s no great task to link nationalism and right wing sentiment (you will notice that the UKIP or the BNP aren’t progressive in their political opinions), and that section of society would be pandered to a lot more when the tantalising nationalism of independence wasn’t appealing to it any longer.

 

Yet the argument that an independent Scotland could be a Tory-free Scotland appealed to a lot of people. Indeed, I knew more people who were influenced to vote yes by this argument than any other. But now the yes vote, which was so enthused by this idea of a Tory-free Scotland, may end up being the main factor in handing back power to a Tory government at the first opportunity (due to all that dishonest SNP political manoeuvring I earlier mentioned). Not just in Scotland but the entire UK – support that could go to the opponents of the Tories, Labour, is being deceptively garnered away for the SNP’s nationalistic intentions. So not only did the SNP fail in guaranteeing a Tory-free rule in Scotland – which was supposedly what their supporters so desired – but it’s now purposefully relieving Scotlandand the UK of its opportunity to avoid it. If closing down debate wasn’t enough, the SNP are now partaking in an ironic political sabotage of their own supporter’s opinions. The UK’s only hope is that SNP supporters realise this before voting in May.

John Gray’s recent Guardian article threatened to unearth the ‘New Atheists’ Achilles heel; what we are really afraid of. Yet, in reality, he provided nothing more than a few digs of the ‘atheism will never win’ type, swiftly backed up with apologism on behalf of religious atrocities/against atheistic atrocities, all wrapped up in a cosy ignorance of the difference between actual science (the scientific method and its results) and bad philosophy (people who advocate social Darwinism falsely under the banner of being scientific). Perhaps he hasn’t read a great volume of atheist writers in recent times, but the more succinct and sensible of the ‘new atheists’ do not claim religion is a conspiracy for war, or that it poisons everything, but rather we point to the problem of faith. With the use of shameless references to Marvel and its characters, which I in no way intend to be offensive to people of religious faith (unless that faith is toward DC comics), the following is a response to Gray’s comments. Here’s hoping that you, dear reader, are that niche philosophy and super-hero fan market I’ve been hoping to unearth.

 

The honesty and humility to admit one is wrong is where progress lies – both moral and technological – and whilst we humans are filled with psychological bias, science provides us a system with which we can be proven wrong and thus be better. Religion, on the other hand, is a custom-made mechanism for avoiding disproof. Inbuilt into it is the dogma of ‘faith’, which disciplines scepticism and rewards loyalty. The discipline and reward that religion invented was of such a grand nature – eternal damnation or eternal satisfaction, respectively, in many mono-theistic religions – that it serves as the most severe form of stagnation you could imagine. Consider, for a second, what physics would look like if Galileo, Newton and other great theorists had built in this kind of systematic belief protection – a mythical system of discipline and reward for encouraging people to keep believing and never progress any further – and you would be looking at a far less developed world than at current. Scientists are full of the same bias as any of the rest of us, but scientific method keeps them in check.

 

Still, many on the side of religious apologism don’t disagree with the use of science. Like Gray, they seem to want and respect physical science whilst saying that it has no place in wider academic discussions like morality. We like our computers, our planes, our skyscrapers and our space travel, but we’d like our morality to remain mystical and primitive, please. Not because of our personal, religious opinions, of course, but because science can not justifiably interject on matters of morality. Science can measure, observe and hypothesise about the physical world, but it has no place in morality.

 

These kinds of arguments have been the trigger to my own work on this subject, mostly because they represent – at least to some degree – a good argument. The more academically inclined will recognise it as the ‘is-ought’ problem, which I find to be one of the most fascinating and yet misunderstood in philosophy. In a nutshell, this is the logic that tells us that science can tell us how a thing ‘is’, not how it ‘ought’ be.

 

Of course this is true, in part: science has no true ability in determining ‘ought we allow for euthanasia?’. Science (in its widest sense of including logic and maths) might help us with calculating the annual number of deaths, the number of people experiencing locked in syndrome, or excruciating, terminal cancer symptoms. Similarly it might even be able to help with telling us how likely it is that scrupulous people could take advantage of euthanasia laws. But we are very sceptical as to whether it could tell us what we ought do about any given situation. This was a logical path originally set out by David Hume and still revered by many philosophers today.

 

To posit religion as an answer, though, is to assume that the lack of power in science to answer moral questions is not shared by religion. Science is reliable at testing many of religion’s claims, in fact – from the miracles to the meta-physical – and has yet to find justification for religious belief anymore than it has for David Blaine being an actual miracle worker, or Spiderman currently residing in Butlins Skegness. Positing religion as a potential answer to subjects that science can’t help with, is like positing alchemy as a solution to the unanswered problems of chemistry. Even if science can not answer moral questions, religion is no more an option to turn to than Marvel comics.

 

This has traditionally been the point at which devout religious leaders have shrieked “moral nihilism!” in order to close down debate and force belief toward religious dogma and away from science. If we believe science is the great tool it has shown itself to be, and it shows morality to be unscientific, but also religion to be unscientific, then we are left – religious leaders claim – with moral nihilism. That is: morality doesn’t really exist, and we are each out for ourselves. So quickly queue up for this wafer in the name of vanquishing all that is science!

 

Except, of course, that the scaremongering is just that: baseless scaremongering. The premises – that science has disproved religion, but that natural morality is also the thing of myth – are true, but the conclusion – that we should all be moral nihilists – is a wildly illogical jump. Science is our tool. We use it, it works and let’s be honest, it tells us that God is highly unlikely to exist. We can doubt its conclusions about this, in the same way that we can doubt that Spiderman is fiction, however that level of doubt is not significant. But just because religion, comics and other possible sources of justifiable morality are the stuff of fiction, doesn’t mean we can’t still have our own values that we define and follow socially. In fact, the majority of laws in society – with their constant amendments and additions – are not about religion, or mentioned in any holy book (or comic). They are a matter of pragmatism, and they exist because morality is useful.

 

The problem with our current moral norms – be they legally entombed or not – is that they were often developed from a base of religious principles, which were predictably hit or miss in relation to a well functioning society. For instance women’s place as male property was enshrined alongside the more useful stance against murder. They were reflections of moral culture at the time, backed by a fictional story. It’s no surprise that some still reflect moral thought whilst others are entirely wrong.

 

What we can do, as increasingly secular nations, is to dissect and analyse what we currently have with the use of reason rather than tradition. We can ask what still makes sense as a basic moral value, what follows from it, and what has been pointlessly added or ignored. Most of us, if not all, seem to still agree that morality is useful: we, like vampire bats and ants, find social norms to be compelling even when we don’t think that God wants us to believe it. If we collectively agree that we want morality, then we can have it. And we can make it rational by extending our basic moral beliefs to logical moral outcomes.

 

In the same way that we have and enjoy art galleries and cinemas, science’s inability to judge what we ought to value or enjoy seeing at the movies does not mean that either science is wrong or that we should be artistic nihilists. To argue that case is to argue illogically. We can still just decide to have values because we want them.

 

What we ‘Militant New Atheists’ – or ‘rationalists’, as philosophical history rather than media opponents would have us labelled – are truly scared of is dogma. Its ability to close down debate, its posting of inaccurate logical quandaries, and its dogged admiration for religion rather than the values of the people cowering behind it (whether that cowering is learned or not). What we are not afraid of is doubt, perhaps surprisingly to those such as Gray who profess this to be what we want freedom from. Given evidence, I will doubt everything I know: including what the term ‘evidence’ could or should entail. Doubt is the only constant I can throw my whole-hearted support behind, in fact, as it is all that ensures against comfort with outdated or improvable views. It is that niggling doubt that has prompted each and every progression in history – technological or moral – as it leads to further interest and ideas.

 

“Is that actually true?” “Couldn’t we do better than that?” Doubt is perhaps the only unifying feature of modern atheism which proponents are likely to throw their arms around and embrace.

 

So will we see John Gray issue a rebuttal, updating his article in tomorrow’s Guardian to accept these comments, straight from the horses’ new atheist mouth? I doubt it. It’s up to you whether you think that says more about him or me, though.