Contemporary Scotland
Third Year Option: 2003-2004 (Keith Dixon)
Introductory
remarks
I would
like to begin my discussion of Scottish culture in the 20th century, with a
preliminary discussion of the rise of Scottish nationalism and the 20th century
redefinitions of Scottishness which, I
will argue, are inseparable from the two phases of renewal of Scottish cultural
theory and practice.
Nationalism,
as you well know, since the nineteen eighties, been the motor force behind the
monumental changes taking place in the societies of the ex-Eastern European
bloc, for good or for bad. It has also been the pretext, in the Balkans, for
the forced exodus of whole populations in the name of "ethnic
cleansing". For the second time in the history of the 20th century,
nationalism has lost its innocence. Any discussion of nationalism in Scotland
today must take into account the atrocities that can continue to be committed
in the name of nationalism in the Balkans and elsewhere, although
self-evidently we cannot blame the cultural or political "small
nation" nationalists of the early 20th century for the sins committed in
the name of nationalism during the Second World War or in ex-Yugoslavia. We can however put a healthy
distance between ourselves and the nationalists’ sometimes romantic
reinventions of their respective pasts.
Modern
peripheral nationalism in the British Isles can be seen in several phases. The
key period, in relation to the development of new visions of Scottishness was the
last two decades of the 19th century, during which the Irish question came
back into the public eye, and which saw the rise and fall of the great Irish
constitutional nationalist, Charles S. Parnell (1846-1891), leader of the Irish
party in the British parliament 1880-1890, the emergence of an essentialist
political and cultural nationalism in Ireland which was to pave the way to the Easter
Rising (1916), the Black and Tan War (1918-1921) and the eventual
separation of the Island into two political units (the Anglo-Irish Treaty was
signed in December 1921, after Lloyd George had threatened the nationalist
delegation with “immediate and terrible war”). These various events were to
inform and inspire, and in some cases to repel, some of the major thinkers of the Scottish nationalist movement
of the inter-war period.
It should
be remembered that on a more modest scale, while events were unravelling
dramatically in Ireland, Scotland was also undergoing some significant
political changes, during the same period. 1882 had seen the creation of the Highland
Land League and the opening of a period of intense agrarian agitation in
the Highlands of Scotland, ususally described somewhat melodramatically as the
Crofters’ War. In 1886 the moderate Scottish Home Rule Association,
under Liberal influence, was formed, representing the first political
organisation to campaign for Scottish autonomy. In 1888 the small Scottish
Labour Party was formed as a precursor to the British movement, and in 1897
a Scottish Trades Union Congress was also set up. These various events
all pointed in one direction : the break-up of the old Liberal-Unionist
hegemony in Scotland and the emergence of two new movements and ideologies –
nationalism and labourism – which were initially in harmony with each other,
and were to leave their mark on Scottish political developments in the 20th
century.
Before
going any further with this discussion, I would like to interrogate one or two
of the terms that are likely to recur in my discussion. The first of these is
"Scotland". What exactly is it? The traditional response to this
question among those interested in Scottish difference - here I am referring
not only to the nationalist movement, but also to mainstream social and
cultural historians, of various political persuasions, who could not but
recognize that Scotland was another country when compared to its powerful
neighbour - has been to insist on the
particularities of the Scottish constitutional set-up, and to point to those
specifically Scottish institutions that were allowed to survive the Acts of
Union of 1707, and came to be seen as the pillars of Scottishness. There
were, in this view of Scottish history and Scottishness, three such
institutions: the Church, the legal system and education, and it was on these
three pillars that what David McCrone has recently described as the myths of
Scottishness were constructed (David McCrone, Understanding Scotland. The
Sociology of a Stateless Nation, Routledge, 1992). I personally would add a
fourth and crucial sign of Scottish difference, that has survived over the
centuries, despite various attempts at normalization : i.e. language. In any
discussion of the revival of Scottish culture in the mid- and late 20th
century, it is impossible to ignore the language question. I will look at each
of these factors in turn, before going on to develop a critique of the
traditional vision of Scottishness, and propose an alternative.
The Acts
of Union of 1707 were of course a key moment in the evolution towards a
"united" kingdom on the British Isles and, incidentally, in the
development of both Scottishness and Britishness. With hindsight, nationalist
historians and thinkers have seen the agreement as "ane end o' an auld
sang" (the expression was used by the Earl of Seafield in the last debate
in the Scottish parliament in Edinburgh), i.e. the end of an independent
nation, with its own political and cultural institutions, and the beginning of
an anomolous political development whereby "Scotland" continued to
subsist as a "stateless nation", after having traded her national and
political sovereignty against an economic and commercial partnership with her
powerful neighbour. In this negotiated agreement, the interests of Scotland's
economic rulers were well to the fore, which led the poet Robert Burns, later
in the 18th century, to claim in an oft-quoted poem that Scotland had been
"bought and sold for a handful of gold" and to accuse the
"parcel of rogues in a nation". Burns was also no doubt thinking of
the bribes and other forms of financial encouragement which were offered to
those who in the Scottish parliament of 1707 were willing to vote for what was
later to be called an “incorporating union” (in opposition to the “federal-type” solution proposed at the
time by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun).
However,
and precisely because Scotland did not undergo the treatment that was dealt to
Ireland (and finally couched in a legal document in 1801) and later to the colonies of the British
Empire, the Act of Union clearly stipulated that Scotland was to keep her
own distinctive institutions (where, one might add, these did not enter
into conflict with English interests).
In the
religious sphere, Scotland had developed along quite different lines from
England since the Reformation of the mid-16th century. The teachings of the
Reformation thinkers, and in particular of Jean Calvin (1509-1564)and the
Scottish theologian John Knox 1513-1572) , left a profound mark on Scottish
society. Knox was to bequeath several of the key doctrines (borrowing them from
Calvin in the main) that were to become the theological basis of Scottish
presbyterianism : original sin and the
predestination of the elect, for example. It has been argued that even until
the present time, the presbyterian Church of Scotland has played the role of
speaking for Scotland, in the absence of an elected assembly. Be that as it
may, the Presbyterians were, throughout the sevententh, eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries the Spartan rulers of Scotland (to borrow an expression
from the Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon), especially in the rural areas.
Presbyterianism
(represented mainly but not only by the Church of Scotland) is still the
dominant religion in Scotland, although the Industrial Revolution and the
subsequent urbanisation of Scottish society did much to weaken its hold (not to
mention the development of Catholicism as a result of Irish immigration in the
West). I will be arguing that there is still what we might call a secularized
Calvinism in many contemporary cultural practices and attitudes in Scotland
(everything from Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting to Scottish feminism).
The
Scottish reformers were strict, puritanical and prided themselves on the
"democratic" and "egalitarian" aspects of their religious
practice, which they claimed were lacking in their Roman Catholic and
Episcopalian rivals. Their rigour was to mark social life in the Scottish
countryside (and later was to be exported to the North-East of Ireland, which
became the second home for calvinism on the British Isles). Their puritanism,
however, as well as fostering a witch-hunt mentality against sexual difference,
led them to be suspicious of all forms of non-religious creativity (all forms
of imaginative activity, dixit Cairns Craig in a recent article
published in Etudes Ecossaises). Consequently their relations with the
writers of Scotland, until recent times, have often been tumultuous. This
particularity of church-culture relations in Scotland is evident during the
period I will be focussing on during these introductory remarks, i.e. the
Twenties and Thirties. Anti-Calvinism became a recurrent theme among the
writers of the so-called Scottish Renaissance: as the iron grip of the Kirk
began to weaken, writers could increasingly express their opposition to church
doctrine without fear of reprisal. This anti-Calvinism is often expressed in
attacks on the fundamentalist wing of Scottish presbyterianism, the Free Church
of Scotland, which Grassic Gibbon described as follows in a polemical essay on
religion published in 1934:
“The
modern Free Church member is the ancient Presbyterian who has learned nothing
and forgotten nothing. As certain unfortunate children abandon mental
development at the cretinaceous age of eight, Free Church doctrine, essentially
un-Christian, abandoned development with the coming of the Kelts. It
is a strange and disgusting cult of antique fear and antique spite. It looks
upon all the gracious and fine things of the human body - particularly the body
of woman - with sickened abhorrence, it detests music and light and and life
and mirth, the God of its passionate conviction is a kind of immortal Peeping
Tom, an unsleeping celestial sneak-thief, it seeks to cramp and distort the
minds of the young much as the ancient Maya sought to mould the brain-stuff of
their young by deforming their infants' heads with the aid of tightly-strapped
slats of wood. »
(L.G.Gibbon, "Religion" in Scottish Scene, 1934).
Presbyterianism
then, and its institutionalised expression in the Scottish church, have been
distinctive features of Scottish society, and are often seen as key ingredients
of "Scottishness". Although many a 20th century Scottish writer
rebelled against the Kirk's vision of life and sexuality, many were also the
product of the peculiarly egalitarian and democratic spirit of which the Church
and the education system could be considered to be manifestations. One would,
for example, be hard put to analyze the rhetoric of the poetry of Hugh
MacDiarmid without any reference to the fire and brimstone vocabulary of the
Calvinist preacher.
In
conclusion, it should be pointed out that not only has the rôle and place of
the Church vastly diminished (although the Scots are still marginally a more
church-attending peple than the English) but the social and political doctrine
of Scottish presbyterianism has also udergone some significant changes. In the
nineteen eighties, for instance, the Church of Scotland played an active role,
alongside the Labour party, the Liberal Democrats, the unions and other
representatives of Scottish civil society, in favour of devolution of power and
the creation of a Scottish parliament.
The
education system is
the second pillar of Scottishness which is habitually cited in discussions of
this kind. Its underlying philosophy was, and to a certain extent still is,
distinct from that of the English system. In the 19th century, access to
schooling was undoubtedly wider, in social terms, in Scotland than in England,
and this explains the observed differentials in literacy rates in the two
countries. Benedict Anderson in his highly influential book on nationalism, Imagined
Communities, (Verso 1983) cites the following figures for 1855: 89% of
males and 77% of females could write their signature in Scotland compared with
70% and 59% in England.
This
notion of a school system that provided opportunities for educational and
social advancement to the deserving youngsters of the labouring classes was
given the force of a national myth in the populist "Kailyard"
literature of the late 19th century which exploited the stereotype of the
"lad o' pairts". The "lad o' pairts" is the young male
character (there was no equivalent "lass o' pairts") from a poor or working-class
background who goes on to succeed in the world (most often encouraged by the
local village schoolteacher or minister) thanks to an education system that
provides moral and financial support to the hard-working and and meritricious
members of the lower orders. He was to occupy a key function in the fictional
works of "Ian MacLaren", S.R. Crocket and J.M. Barrie, and provided
novelistic "proof" for the myth of Scottish educational democracy.
More
democratic access was not, however, the only self-proclaimed particularity of
the Scottish education system : the teaching provided at late-secondary and
above all university level was and still is more broad-based. Scottish
universities have prided themselves on their wide-ranging courses of study
offered to Arts students, with their particular stress on the acquisition of a
basic knowledge of philosophical enquiry (in contradistinction to the much more
specialised courses offered by English universities). The institutional
consequence of these different approaches to education was the different
examination system, as well as a longer degree course in Scotland. Although
greater uniformity has come with time, there are still strong traces of the
separate school and university system in Scotland, and still influential voices
claiming the inherent superiority of Scotland's democratic and polymath
intellect.
The third
institution of Scottish society that was allowed to subsist after the signing
of the Act of Union was the legal system, which even now, despite
onslaughts from all-British legislation and the equalising effects of European
community law continues to differ significantly from its English and Welsh
counterpart. Scottish law is based on Roman law and in this sense is closer to
the French than to the English system: the process of law (in particular the
organisation of the legal profession and court procedures) is quite
distinctive, although recently there have been moves afoot to bring the Scots
legal system more into line with the English (with proposals to abolish the
Scottish verdict of non-proven in criminal trials, for example).
In
traditional discussion of Scottishness these three institutions are said to
provide the basis for the distinctiveness of the social formation North of the
Tweed. A fourth, key element should be mentioned here: language. For any one
who has visited Scotland, it should be self-evident that the way people speak,
and to a much lesser extent write, in Scotland marks them off from there
English counterparts. Not only this but, despite substantial lexical,
grammatical and phonological differences from one area of Scotland to another,
there is a perceived community of linguistic identity among the Scots (a farmer
from the Mearns in the North-East may not immediately take to a Glasgow
bus-driver when he meets him on the Costa Brava, but they both intuitively know
they belong to the same linguistic community).
Of
course, the vast majority of the Scots are English-speakers, and have nothing
of the linguistic distinctiveness of a Breton or a Irish Gaelic speaker. If a
few monolingual Gaelic speakers may still linger in the Western Isles, on the
whole Scotland has been successfully anglicised from the language standpoint.
Nonetheless, most Scots (apart from those of the upper classes who have been
successfully de-Scotticized) do experience some form of liguistic duality, and
for some that duality verges on schizophrenia, as they hesitate between their
"native" idiom and the language of more formal communication..
There are
in fact three languages spoken in Scotland, although no doubt my
linguist friends would argue that there are strictly speaking only two
languages and at best a dialect. (I myself am not taking into account the
languages of the various incomer communities, such as Polish, Italian, Yiddish,
Urdu, etc.). The language of officialdom, of communication in the media, and
until very recently of social promotion, is of course English, spoken
with a greater or lesser Scottish "accent". The language of the
dwindling population of the West and North of Scotland (the
"Highlands") was originally Gaelic, although there are fewer
and fewer native Scots Gaelic speakers. This Celtic tongue was brought to
Scotland by the Irish in the 5th century and was once the language of affairs
and culture in a large area of Scotland. Actively persecuted after the Jacobite
uprising in the mid-18th century, ignored until recently by the education
system, Gaelic is now of marginal linguistic importance (although its cultural
importance far exceeds its numerical impact). In 1891 there were 254,415 Gaelic
speakers in Scotland representing 6.84% of the population; by 1981 that share
had fallen to 1.64% ; this figure however dissimulates substantial regional
variations: there is still a majority of Gaelic speakers in the outlying
Western Isles of Scotland.
One of
the long-standing and, in my view, justified complaints of the cultural
nationalists in Scotland has been about the neglect of Gaelic culture by
successive governments. Measures have been taken in recent years to improve the
situation, with radio and television broadcasting in Gaelic, and the growth of
Gaelic-based primary schools, but the moves have come too late to make any real
impact on what is now virtually a dead language in Scotland, or to remove the
sense of grievance felt by many Highlanders about the way that history (and the
South) have treated them.
Consubstantial
with this sense of grievance in the Gaelic-speaking areas of Scotland is the
lingering memory of the Clearances (from the mid-18th until the mid-19th
centuries), when a combination of changes in land ownership relations, changes
in farming practice and outright repression (carried out by the English, the
Lowland Scots and the Highland chiefs-cum-landlords) effectively dealt a
grievous blow to Gaelic, clannic culture. It was the so-called clearance of the
Highlands for sheep-farming (from the second half of the 18th until the middle
of the 19th centuries) which drove the original inhabitants in their thousands
either South to the factories of Glasgow or the English midlands, or across the
Atlantic to form the emigrant communities of Canada or the USA. The injustice
of this period of Scottish history has been a dark source of inspiration for
Scottish writers of the 20th century, particularly those associated with the
Scottish cultural renaissance of the inter-war period (see, for example,the
novels of Neil Gunn and Fionn MacColla, Butcher's Broom (1934) and And
the Cock Crew (1945), or the poetry of Sorley MacLean).
The third
language of Scotland is variously described as Braid or Broad Scots, Lallans,
the Doric, etc. Scots is the historical speech of the Lowlands of Scotland,
derived from the 'Inglis' of Northern England. Outside influences on the
original Inglis were, as might be expected in a country which underwent
wave after wave of invasion, quite
diverse. Over the centuries a certain number of Gaelic words found their way
into the Scots tongue (some of them on their way to being integrated into
English): bog, cairn, glen, strath, loch, etc. Certain phonological
features of the Norse language of the Viking invaders were also taken over (in
this respect it is interesting to note the particular dialect of the Shetland
Islands which combines a strong Nordic influence with Scots). Several phases of
French influence on the Scots language can also be traced: Norman French until
about the year 1200, Central and Parisian French thereafter: this has left us
with terms such as leal (faithful), ashet (plate), douce (gentle),
dour (hard, morose), tassie (cup). The Franco-Scottish or Auld
Alliance (1296 - 1560) also had its impact on Scots speech, leaving such
traces as vaig (roam), disjune (breakfast), fash (bother),
gardyloo (call to dodge a splash).
It should
be remembered that during the last couple of centuries before the process that
led to the Acts of Union, the Scots language was constantly gaining
ground on the Gaelic.
With the
rise of the burghs and early industrialisation came an influx of skilled
artisan labour, in particular from the Netherlands: the Dutch who continued to
arrive until the 18th century also left their mark on Scots: many a Dutch word
is still commonly used in everyday Scots speech: crune (sing softly), redd
(tidy up), dowp (buttocks), loun (boy) or pinkie (little
finger).
By the
end of the 14th century, Scots speech had become quite distinct from that of
the South of England (as distinct as present-day Dutch from German):
phonological and lexical differences were moreover consolidated by political
independence. The language was considered adequate for the needs of
administration and legislation, and was already the vehicle of literature (see,
for example, Barbour's romance in Scots entitled The Brus (1375)). By
the end of the 15th century, the Scots were sufficiently aware of the
differences between their native speech and metropolitan English to begin to
call it Scottis and no longer the historic Inglis. The early 16th
century can be seen as the high point of literary Scots. It is to this period
of the Makars that Hugh MacDiarmid, the central figure of the Scottish
renaissance, was to turn in the 1920s in his attempt to resurrect the Scottish
language for literary purposes.
However,
just as the Scots language was coming into its own and proving capable of expressing
not only the affairs of the city but also the abstractions of heart and mind,
several influences were to combine to spell its downfall as the national
language of Scotland:
* The
Reformation, which as we have already seen had such a powerful impact on
Scottish life found Scotland without a vernacular version of the Bible - the
only available translation was the Geneva English version of 1560. Thus from
the mid-16th century on, the word of God in Scotland was English. We should add
to this the sectarian practices of the Scottish presbyterians who actively
discouraged access to any form of literature that was not of religious or
biblical origin. From this period on we can trace the origins of that crippling
dichotomy , which continues to inform linguistic practice in contemporary
Scotland, and which was to make English increasingly the language of formality
and serious enquiry, and Scots the language of home and homeliness,
sentimentality and humour.
* When
the King of the Scots came to the throne of England in 1603 (the Union of
the Crowns), the language of the court and therefore of social prestige was
to become English and not Scots. With the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, the
language of the South achieved a political status which set it well above the
native Scots speech. From this point on, polite society in Scotland tended
increasingly to ape the manners and speech of their southern neighbours.
Despite some isolated last-ditch attempts to save Scots as an all-round form of
expression, by the late 18th century Scots had become the language of
vulgarity: it was not unusual at this time for the upper classes of Edinburgh
and Glasgow to recruit tutors to improve their diction and above all eradicate
all traces of Scotticism. Scots, in one or other of its dialect forms,
continued to be the spoken idiom of the vast majority of the Scots population,
but it whithered as the language of poetic or creative expression.
This
situation continued well into the 20th century. Inevitably, Scottish literature
from the late 18th century on was to reflect this dichotomy. In the works of
Walter Scott (1771 - 1832), for example, Scots mainly appears in the dialogues
and is kept out of the narrative passages: it is moreoever most often the
medium of expression of the uneducated. In later works of the 19th century, and
in particular in the novels and short stories of the Kailyard school, Scots
becomes an indicator of ignorance, or even worse a mere addition of local
colour to amuse the middle-class or English reader (this statement should be
qualified in the light of recent research work by William Donaldson on Scots
prose in late 19th century Scottish newspapers).
If I have
spent so much time on this discussion of the history of Scots, it is because
the issue is still today surrounded with a thick cloud of ignorance and
prejudice in Scottish society (not to mention French academia). Not only this:
the language question was at the very heart of the Scottish literary
renaissance, launched by MacDiarmid (1892-1978), and was contradictorily to
inspire the work of the anti-nationalist Lewis Grassic Gibbon. It has moreover
re-emerged in a new form in contemporary writing, as a growing number of poets
and novelists turn to the heavily Scottish urban sociolect of Glasgow and
Edinburgh as a medium of poetic expression (Tom Leonard, Jim Kelman, Irvine
Welsh, Alan Warner).
Scotland
then has its own church, legal and education systems and linguistic
specificity. It is without a doubt another country: significantly differing from
England in terms not only of the way people speak or worship, but increasingly
of the way the majority think and vote. This has led some in Scotland,
following in the wake of the cultural nationalists of the Thirties, to speak of
Scotland's "singular identity", with all the ambiguity that
“singular” takes on in this phrase. Just as hatred of the Irish was common in
the Scotland of the Twenties and Thirties, so Anglophobia infects certain
minority sectors of present-day Scotalnd. This will be my essential bone of
contention with the nationalist vision of Scotland. Scotland is not one but
many: the identities of the Scots folk, like those of people in any other area
of the world are not singular but plural. This will be a recurrent theme in the
rest of my discussion of Scottish "identity" as it was reconstructed
in the imaginings of the writers of the Scottish Renaissance, and continues to
be remodelled today.
I will
now be looking at the particularities of what has been called the Scottish
Cultural Renaissance of the inter-war period. This was a movement with both a cultural and political dimension
which emerged after the First World War : it was to be marked by political
debates around the notion of Scottishness, or Scottish identity and was for a
time a major moment in Scottish cultural production. I would like to put
forward the hypothesis that the Renaissance movement that was launched almost
single-handedly by MacDiarmid in the Twenties owed much to Irish cultural
nationalism, although this is seldom recognised in Scotland, because of the
troubled nature of the cultural, economic political relations between the two
nations. Indeed the relations between Scotland and Ireland have long been a
blind spot in Scottish political and cultural debate, and it is only of late
(over the aste decade or so) that more serious academic discussion of these
relations have been undertaken. The Irish factor in the Scottish nationalist
awakening of the Twenties and Thirties was not simply or even perhaps mainly to
do with the events taking place in Ireland (1916 Easter Rising; Black and Tan
War from 1918-1921; Peace Treaty of 1921 and internecine strife between the two
nationalist camps after the signing of the Treaty). Above all it was to be the
theorisations, in both political and cultural terms, of Irish nationalism that
were to have most impact on the Scottish movement, although most of the main
protagonists in the latter avoided mention of Ireland.
I would
now like to look at the other determinants of Scottish political and above all
cultural nationalism in the Twenties and Thirties. These are to be found not
only in the history of European ideas: although MacDiarmid owed a great deal to
the Russian slavophiles, and particularly to Dostoevsky's mystical notion of
the Russian nation, as well as to the Landsmaal language revival
movement in Norway, not to mention the virulent theorisations of nationalism
closer home, cf. the ideas of Maurras and the French Action Française, there
are also clear determinants within Scottish cultural history.
To
understand what was happening in Scotland in the inter-war years it is perhaps
useful to cast our eyes back to the 19th century and dwell on the
difficulties encountered by Scottish culture as Scottish society more generally
benefited not only from the economic improvements brought about by the
Industrial revolution but also from front-line participation in the Britsih
imperial adventure? We must stress that certain categories of the Scottish
population were to draw very real material benefits from being at the hub of
the British Empire. At home Scottish industry thrived on cheap raw materials
from Britain’s colonial territories (cf. the tobacco trade in Glasgow or Jute
manufacturing in Dundee) and abroad the administration and the military
surveillance of the Empire provided jobs for Scots willing to leave their home
country (perhaps the already long tradition of emigration from Scotland
facilitated this process). Scotland then, as T.C. Smout has argued, gained
greatly from its participation in the British imperium, and no doubt these
material gains went some way to explaining the political acquiescence to
“London rule” throughout most of the 19th century. Scottish politics
were at this time resolutely unionist, even if, as we have already suggested,
dual patriotism was not uncommon.
However,
from a cultural point of view the situation was somewhat more ambivalent,
although the controversy over the reality of Scottish cultural progress in the
19th century continues to the present day (cf. Cairns Craig’s
chapter in L’Autonomie Ecossaise). It has become a critical commonplace
to point to the dearth of quality Scottish writing after the death of Sir
Walter Scott in 1832. Indeed, the second half of the 19th century is very much
of a desert in the history of Scottish literature, with only very few
exceptions (this statement should perhaps be qualified in the light of recent
research work carried out by Dr William Donaldson from the University of
Aberdeen on popular vernacular writing in the Scottish press during the 19th
century). One of the exceptions is of course is the Edinburgh-born Robert Louis
Stevenson (1850-1894), whose literary merits may be debated, but who left
Scottish literature with a series of powerful evocations of the double or split
personality, the most famous being his Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. These
writings were later to be given a symbolic importance as being representative
of a specifically Scottish schizophrenia, or what one literary historian in the
early in the 20th century (G. Gregory Smith in Scottish Literature,
1919) was to describe in literary terms as the Caledonian Antisyzygy,
i.e. the coexistence of two moods in Scottish literature, fantasy and dour
realism. The Antisyzygy was the clash of these two moods. MacDiarmid, in his
search for the signs of Scottish difference, was to portray this clash of
contraries as a basic character trait of the Scots, which diffentiated them
fundamentally from their prosaic, pragmatic English neighbours (you will
recognize here the stereotype of the phlegmatic Englishman).
But here we are moving on to fast. The late Victorian period in Scotland was dominated by a form of literature, which can be analysed as one of the main determinants of
MacDiarmid's cultural rebellion in the
Twenties, in the sense that this was what MacDiarmid was
essentially rebelling against.
I am referring to the Kailyard
School. Sentimental, anti-realist, parochial and immensely popular, the
Kailyarders, J.M.Barrie, S.R.Crocket and "Ian MacLaren" were
Scottish literature for twenty-odd years, during the last decade of the 19th
and the first decade of the 20th centuries. The term itself is a Scottish one:
the "kailyard" is the Scottish countryman's cabbage patch. It was
first used as a term of literary abuse by the critic and literary historian,
J.H.Millar, in an article for W.E.Henley's New Review. Millar was one of
the rare literary critics of the time to have little time for the Kailyarders.
The term itself suggests that this
generation of Scottish writers were above all preoccupied with what was
happening in their own small back garden and had in that way become cut off
from the most exciting developments in the mainstream of European culture. This
at least was to be the charge held against the kailyarders by the new post-war
generation of Scottish writers.
Their
vision of Scotland, which is to be found in best-selling novels like Barrie's A
Window Thrums or MacLaren's Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, was one of
rosy sentimentalism. Village gossip and local colour abound. The niceties of
provincial Scottish life are described in detail. There is an explicit refusal
of realism. Although the Kailyarders drew most of their characters from the
Scottish provincial working-classes (ploughmen, weavers, farm workers, with
also of course a liberal dosing of church ministers and local notables), any
notion of social realism is entirely absent. Kailyard Scotland is static and
hierarchical, and the fictional poor who haunt their pages always know their
place. Another particularity of Kailyard fiction, especially the novels of
J.M.Barrie (1860-1937), is the prominence of female characters, but here again
there is a significant absence of psychological or sexual verisimilitude. There
is definitely no sex in the Kailyard.
The
Scottish neo-Gramscian historian, Chris Harvie, sees this refusal of realism as
being determined by the social and religious positions of the writers involved.
All identified strongly with the puritanical Scottish petty bourgeoisie; all
were associated more or less closely with the Free Church of Scotland, i.e. the
fundamentalist wing of Scottish presbyterianism. Harvie sums this up in the
following passage:
“The
moral indictment must be made. Scottish society (in the late 19th
century – K.D.) was beset with terrifying social problems which any realistic
treatment was bound to expose; and of these, the customary targets of religious
condemnation- alcoholism and promiscuity – were merely accompaniments of the deep-seated and intractable
evils of poverty and overcrowding which the economic system was incapable of
remedying. Realism in literature would not only expose these, thus posing a
revolutionary challenge to society, it would break the discipline of puritanism
by mentioning the unmentionable. The Kirk enforced silence out of conviction:
the middle classes out of fear. The bogus community of the Kailyard was
promoted as an alternative to the horror of the real thing. »
Christopher
Harvie in Scotland and Nationalism, 1977
As part
of a more general reaction in the immediate post-war period to what the younger
generation of British writers, in a wave of gerontophobia, perceived as the
sins of their elders, MacDiarmid set out to build Scottish literature on a new
footing (in this sense what MacDiarmid undertook in Scotland was not very
different from what was to be done by the so-called Auden generation of writers
in England). Mentioning the unmentionable, to use Chris Harvie's phrase, was to
be at the very heart of the problematic of the Renaissance writers.
The
points I have just raised may have cleared away some misunderstandings, in that
I have tried to show that there were specifically Scottish determinants behind
the cultural revival of the Twenties and Thirties, and in particular a reaction
to the Kailyard's refusal to "mention the unmentionable". A reaction,
then, against the soporific, sentimental and vehemently anti-realist vision of
Scottish social reality as represented by Kailyard fiction. However, I perhaps
did not sufficiently stress that the movement, led by MacDiarmid, was also and
above all firmly anchored in Scotland's changing social and political reality.
The late
nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period of unrest and rupture with
the past. It was during this period that a crucial rewriting of the all-British
political map was taking place, with the emergent Irish crisis, the nascent
working class movement that was to increasingly mark its political autonomy,
and of course the Suffragette demands for political equality between men and
women.
In
Scotland, the old liberal-unionist hegemony among the intellectuals was under
attack already from the outside. As the economic situation darkened (with the
decline of the traditional heavy industries and the outward flow of investment)
Scotland became the breeding-ground not only for what were to become the
official organisations of the British labour movement (the Scottish and
Independent Labour parties), but also for a working-class political radicalism
which reached its zenith in the period from 1915 to 1921, during what was to
become known as the Red Clyde (James Maxton, John MacLean, Manny
Shinwell, Davie Kirkwood, Willie Gallacher, etc)).
The First
World War marked a watershed. The generation of young intellectuals who grew
out of that collective trauma of mass massacre were to go on to repudiate the
ideas of their elders, not only about culture, but also on morals and politics.
MacDiarmid's revolt against Scottish cultural parochialism and his espousal of
radical Socialist politics and nationalism are to be seen in the light of this
all all-British (all-European) movement.
The idea
of "mentioning the unmentionable" was of course central to European
cultural production in the inter-war years (under the twofold influence of
Marxism and psycho-analysis), and it found an echo not only in the vehement
polemics of MacDiarmid aimed against what he called "all the touts,
toadies and lickspittles of the English ascendancy", but also in the
pioneering educational theories of the Scottish schoolmaster, A.S. Neill, who
went on to found Summerhill, or the critical realism of a Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
But, there is little doubt that the moving spirit behind the cultural revival
was Hugh MacDiarmid, whom I would now like to discuss in some detail.
Hugh
MacDiarmid was born as Christopher Murray Grieve in the border town of Langholm
in 1892. That MacDiarmid was a man from the border country perhaps helps to
explain some of the political enthusiasms that were to mark his later
intellectual development. For the border people were fiercely aware of their
differences from the English and cultivated these. The tradition of
"reiving" or cross-border thieving of cattle (recently evoked in
Alasdair Gray's post-modernist border dystopia, The History Maker,
1994), although a thing of the past in the late 19th century, had left its mark
on the communities on both sides of the border, on their self-image and their
perception of their close neighbours.
MacDiarmid
was the son of a local postman, and he owed much to the radicalism and
republicanism of his father, as well as that of his immediate family. His
schooling in Langholm and later in Edinburgh put him in touch with two
personalities; F.G.Scott, the composer who was later to put MacDiarmid's poetry
to music and George Ogilvie who was to encourage Mac Diarmid's first attempts
at creative writing.
By 1911
he had already left school (in mysterious circumstances) and was trying to earn
a living for himself as a journalist (journalism was to be the recurrent source
of funding for MacDiarmid throughout in his career as a poet). He had also
joined the Fabian society, and participated at this early age in the work of
the Fabian Research Department. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps from
1915-1919. By the end of the war, his socialist convictions were confirmed and
he had come over to a vision of Scottish nationalism, which at the time he saw
as the application to his own country of the principles for which the war was
fought (the right of self-determination for small nations).
In the
1920s he lived and worked in Montrose as a journalist on the Montrose Review.
It was from Montrose that he launched his all-out attack on the Scottish
cultural establishment which he saw as collaborating in Scotland's cultural and
political subordination to England.
By the
late twenties, he already had some considerable reputation, in Scotland and in
England as a poet, critic and polemicist (contributions not only to Scottish
journals, such as the Scottish Educational Journal, but also London
reviews, in particular Orage's New Age). In 1929 he moved to London, and
on to Liverpool, to start what was to be a quite catastrophic period in
England, which led to the break-up of his marriage and nervous breakdown. There
followed eight years of exile and poverty on the Shetland island of Whalsay
(the poetry of this period turns its back on the early experimentation in broad
Scots, and becomes altogether more cerebral, and demanding for the reader). He
was employed as a factory worker during the Second World war, and it was not
until his obtaining a Civil List pension in 1950, that he could at last settle
down with some minimal degree of comfort (at the age of 58) to full-time
writing.
From a
political point of view, MacDiarmid seems an almost caricatural example of his
own notion of the Caledonian Antisyzygy: he helped to found the National
Party of Scotland in 1928, but was expelled when this party became the Scottish
National Party in 1934 (he disapproved of the merger with the conservative
Scottish Party); he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1934
and was expelled in 1938. He joined the party again in 1957 after the Budapest
uprising. Throughout his life he defended an extreme form of Scottish
nationalism, which led him to have in his own words some "strange
bedfellows". He sympathized with Mussolinian nationalism in the mid-Twenties
and for a brief period with what he called the "post-socialist"
nationalism of the national socialist movement in Germany. Like that other
"poète maudit" of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound, he was an ardent
defender of the hair-brained economic scheme of the Scottish engineer and
self-styled economist, Major C.H. Douglas (Social credit movement).
MacDiarmid
makes it clear from the very outset in his Chapbook programme that he
sees literature as having a social or political dimension. Literature is
literature because it has a transformational intention. Like the cultural
archaelogists of the Irish literary revival, he then goes on to look critically
at what can be salvaged from Scotland's cultural past in order to construct a
Scottish modernity that would set Scottish literature on a par with the
movement in Europe, and give it a new cutting edge.
There is
of course something stridently essentialist about MacDiarmid's approach,
and this was to remain with him, through thick and thin, to the end of his life
as political and cultural polemicist. He was in search of a Scottish essence,
of what was truly Scottish (hence his reference to "all true Scottish
writers"), and above all of the signs of Scottish difference from the
English.
MacDiarmid
hijacked the notion of the "Caledonian Antisyszygy" and applied it to
the Scottish psyche. But like many other cultural nationalists of the 19th
century, he stressed the language question. Since there was no longer a
sufficient social and cultural base in the declining Gaeltacht, he turned in
these early years to the old Scots tongue, the Doric. The idea was to revive
the old language of Lowland Scotland (which still survived in oral form in the
diverse idioms of various parts of rural Scotland), not as a museum piece but
as a medium of modern expression.
This is
quite central to MacDiarmid's cultural nationalist argument of the time. He
was, he freely admitted, fascinated by what he called "the unexplored
possibilities of vernacular expression", and he believed that the renewed
use of the vernacular could bring out the "distinctive characteristics of
Scottish life" in a way that English never could (he was to go on later in
the decade to argue that English was a spent medium for artistic expression).
It should be pointed out that he saw Joyce's modernist experimentation with
vernacular Irish English as part of the same demonstration of the bankruptcy of
literary English.
It is
perhaps of less interest here to discuss what MacDiarmid saw as the specific
contribution of vernacular Scots (Saurat refers to this in his article);
suffice to say that MacDiarmid believed that the language could and should be
revamped as part of a general movement of "de-anglicisng" Scottish
culture, just as he believed that it was necessary to de-anglicise the Scottish
polity. He wanted to get to and promote the "essence of the genius of our
race", and believed the Doric could establish that "blood bond"
of national awareness. The following passage gives some measure of the
ambitions MacDiarmid had for the language revival:
« The
Vernacular is a vast unutilised mass of lapsed observation made by minds whose
attitudes to experience and whose speculative and imaginative tendencies were
quite different from any possible to Englishman and Anglicised Scot today. It
is an inchoate Marcel Proust - a Dostoevskian debris of ideas - an
inexhaustible quarry of subtle and significant sound. »
“Hugh
MacDiarmid” in A Theory of Scots Letters, 1925
MacDiarmid
however also had a global vision of change. He shared the messianism of many an
inter-war writer, and the feeling that Western civilisation (and therefore one
of its finest flowers - British civilisation) was coming to an end. This
explains his references to the Spenglerian notion of the "decline of the
West" and the announcement of a new beginning. That he saw Russia and
Scotland as the polar twins of that new beginning did not strike him as
ludicrous at the time.
One
cannot underestimate the impact that MacDiarmid had on the Scottish cultural
scene in the Twenties and Thirties. Throughout the mid- and late Twenties he
kept up a spate of articles on every imaginable aspect of Scottish cultural and
intellectual life (in particular in his weekly column in the Scottish
Educational Journal). Much of this writing was bombastic, derivative (not
to mention downright plagiarism) and vehemently polemical. He accumulated in
the process an impressive list of personal enemies within the
conservative-minded Scottish cultural and academic establishment. But he
managed to win himself a place at the centre of cultural debate in Scotland,
not least because this was also his most fruitful period of artistic creation
(he was admired "abroad" by writers as different as T.S. Eliot and
Sean O'Casey). After a decade of indefatigable campaigning for the Scottish
idea in literature, he made every writer of his generation feel a pressing need
to explain which side of the nationalist/unionist divide he was on.
In an
article written for Left Review in February 1936, the Scottish Marxist
critic and writer, James Barke, was to ask indignantly:
« How
are we to account for the fact that 90% of the Scottish writers – including
minor poets and a host of petty scribblers – are actively or loosely connected
with the Scottish National Party ? »
James
Barke, in Left Review, February 1936.
The short
answer is MacDiarmid.
Throughout
the period, writers of very different political viewpoints - from the
revolutionary MacDiarmid, the social democratic Neil Gunn, the Tory Compton
MacKenzie and Eric Linklater, to the sombre Musollinian Tom MacDonald (Fionn
MacColla) - all gathered around the cultural (and often political) nationalist
standard.
Any
account of the intellectual history of Scottish cultural nationalism in the
inter-war period would be incomplete without the mention of the two major
dissidents to MacDiarmid's vision of a resurgent "Scottish Scotland":
Edwin Muir and Lewis Grassic Gibbon.
I will
have little space to discuss Muir. An
Orcadian whose experience of "Scotland" was traumatic (cf his highly
pessimistic Glasgwo novel, Poor Tom,
published in 1932), he was initially hailed by MacDiarmid as an exciting
young poetic talent of the Renaissance. But they were to grow apart, in
particular on the language question. The point of rupture came with the
publication of Edwin Muir's polemical essay, Scott and Scotland (1936),
in which Muir turned MacDiarmid's antisyzygy back on him, explaining that this
split Scottish psyche was an unsurmountable handicap in the writing of great poetry:
“For,
reduced to its simplest terms, this linguistic division means that Scotsmen
feel in one language and think in another; that their emotions turn to the
Scottish tongue, with all its associations of local sentiment, and their minds
to a standard English which for them is almost bare of associations other than
those of the classroom"
Edwin
Muir, Scott and Scotland (1982), Londres, 1936, p. 8
Muir saw
this split in the Scottish personality as culturally crippling and argued in
favour of abandoning the Scots language, "not capable of the more
exalted forms of reflection, expressing as it does every day and local needs",
and of the generalized use of English for literary purposes.
This was
seen by MacDiarmid as a declaration of war, and Muir was effectively ostracised
from MacDiarmid's circle of friends and acquaintances. Muir was in any case to
disappear off the Scottish scene for long years, as he and his wife chose
voluntary exile in the British Council outposts in Central and later Southern
Europe.
I would
argue that the literary production of James Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic
Gibbon), and in particular, the corpus of Scottish texts (essentially A
Scots Quair and the short stories), stand in a paradoxical relation to the
Scottish Renaissance. On the hand, it can be legitimately said that such work
could not have been undertaken without the preliminary legitimation (and
encouragement) of the use of Scots for serious modern writing, undertaken by
MacDiarmid. On the other hand, the whole drift of Grassic Gibbon's work, in
style and content, is against the founding ideas of the Renaissance.
Grassic
Gibbon, as a certain number of contemporary political observers have
opportunistically discovered, was both insistent on the existence of a
specific Scottish identity and virulently anti-nationalist. This has led
to fifty years of misunderstanding and sometimes deliberate misreading of
Grassic Gibbon's work. (cf. Murison, Lewis Grassic Gibbon was “torn at heart between nationalism and
revolution"; David Craig, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and MacDiarmid are
“nationalists almost more than they are socialists").
Like
MacDiarmid, Grassic Gbbon was interested in the rehabilitation of Broad Scots.
However, this was not in order to excavate the essence of the Scottish spirit,
but rather to represent the speech of the people in a prose that made a poetic
compromise with that speech.
Again
like MacDiarmid, Grassic Gibbon had a utopian quasi-Marxist vision of society,
but his analysis of the primacy of class struggle over the struggle for
nationhood alienated him as a writer and as a polemicist from those who read
Scotland and Scottish history differently.
He sees
that history as continuous struggle between exploited and exploiters, and,
idiosyncratically for a 1930s writer, he sides with the rural as opposed to the
urban proletariat. All of his work can be seen as a salute to the crofters, to
a dying class and a dying ethic. This explains the elegiac tone that impregnates
much of his writing.
The real
Scotland, for Grassic Gibbon, is embodied in the land and the people who work
it. With their passing as a historical class (“nothing endures”) there can be
no material basis for a modern Scottish national awareness in Grassic Gibbon's
eyes. Nationalism (in its cultural or political forms) thus becomes at best an
irrelevance, at worst an obstacle) to the process of social transformation that
in which Grassic Gibbon anchors his literary practice ("All my work is
propaganda"). Hence his self-confessed "cosmopolitanism" and his
vitriolic attacks on nationalist myth and propaganda (in particular in his
essays in Scottish Scene):
“It
will profit Glasgow’s hundred and fifty tghousand slum-dwellers so much to know
that they are being starved and brutalized by Labour Exchanges and Public
Assistance Committees staffed exclusively by Gaelic-speaking, haggis-eating
Scots in saffron kilts and tongued brogues full of such Scottish ideals as
those which kept men chained as slaves in Fifeshire mines a century or so ago.”
Lewis
Grassic Gibbon, in Scottish Scene, Londres, 1934, p.146.
The main
aim of the historical presentation which I have provided you with until now has
been to give you some notion of the very real differences between Scotland and
England (but also we could argue Scotland and Ireland) in terms of language,
culture, religion and law, and at the same time to point out that these had not
been seen as problematic until the end of the 19th century, and then only by a
small minority of the Scottish population, which, as I have argued, benefited
quite substantially, in economic terms from the prolonged partnership with the
Southern neighbour. The dynamic and productive Scottish cultural nationalism of
the inter-war period, dominated by the personality of Hugh MacDiarmid, remained
very much of an intellectual phenomenon, and although it produced a rich
harvest of novels and poetry, music and painting, it made next to no impact on
Scottish political life, that continued to be very largely dominated by the
all-British parties. What we can say, however, is that the representations
of Scotland and Scottishness that were
to emerge during this period and were to leave their mark on inter-war nationalist discourse were largely unhelpful
in political terms : essentialist and inward-looking passeistic and
rural-based, xenophobic at times both in their rejection of “the English”
or their persecution of the Catholic
minority of Irish extraction, these early imaginings of a “Scottish Scotland”
will have to be overcome for the nationalist movement to find a lasting place
on the political scene. This was not to be the case until the last quarter of
the twentieth century.
Britishness,
or to be more precise, the unproblematic dual national identity which most
Scots accepted until well into the 20th century, only began seriously to be
called into question in the late sixties. For most of the so-called “post-war
consensus” the Scots had been content once again to settle into the all-British
framework of a Welfare State and a mixed economy : they were all the more
content to do so since arguably the Scots gained from the new settlement at
least as much if not more than their English neighbours, with buoyant public
services, and a large share of state-controlled industry. When Keynesian
demand management was combined with
state-piloted regional development, the Scottish periphery had much to gain.
The first electoral signs of the breakdown of the Keynesian consensus and
two-party domination in Scotland and of the nationalist awakening we can now,
with the convenient hindsight of the historian, situate in the late sixties,
when the Nationalists began to increase their score in local elections and (in
1967) unexpectedly won a by-election in Hamilton in the West of Scotland.
However, the real breakthrough came in the politically troubled year of 1974,
when the nationalists made spectacular gains (at least in terms of votes) in
both the general elections of that year.
It might
be worth dwelling a moment on the root causes of the nationalist breakthrough.
As you now well know, the early seventies were crisis years in the United
Kingdom. The growing economic and social crisis (what was later to be described
by the media as the "crisis of governability") was compounded by the
emerging civil war in Northern Ireland and the instability that this was to
induce. However, the Northern Ireland crisis can be seen also as the most acute
sign of what one author of the time (Tom Nairn) described as the "break-up
of Britain", i.e. a increasingly generalized tendency to call into
question the constitutional status quo in the United Kingdom. What some have
called the "British periphery" began to make it be known that they
were unhappy with their British destiny, and a growing minority were willing to
abandon the safety of the British multi-national state in order to go it alone.
A
caricatural analysis of this phenomenon might see it merely as the bad-tempered
reaction of the small nations of Britain to the fact that partnership with
England could no longer be hoped to guarantee economic security and steady
progress in the standard of living of all British citizens (England was, so to
speak, no longer delivering the goods). No doubt this was one negative element
in the emergence of small-nation nationalism in the periphery. But there was
perhaps more to it than this. Firstly, the demand for devolution was the
expression of a desire to see political decisions taken nearer to the political
needs and desires of the population (Westminster did seem a long way from the
Shetland Islands, but it was also felt to be at too far a remove from even the
preoccupations of industrial workers and their families in the declining areas
of the West of Scotland). This demand for greater local control over the
political decison-making process was of course not specific to the British
Isles, for this was the period of the emergence or re-emergence of small nation
nationalism elsewhere in Europe (the Basque country, Corsica, Catalonia etc).
In the post-Franquist period it was very much a political reality in Spain,
which developed a highly decentralized political system; even Jacobin France in
the 1980s opted for a far greater degree of decentralization than might have
been imaginable only twenty years before.
The sense
of Britishness that had held the British state together since the eighteenth
century was also in difficulty during this period. Since it had been very much
associated with Britain's predominant role in the world, through the operations
of the Empire, it could only enter into crisis with the decline and
disappearance of Empire. Thus the ground was already prepared for the emergence
of expressions of difference or dissidence within the now problematic framework
of Britishness. This national identity crisis led to the affirmation of new
forms of group belonging, in which all-British patriotism took second place,
and in some cases (as with the peripheral nationalisms) was vehemently
contested. The seventies were after all the period of emergence of many forms
of new group consciousness, such as the feminist movement or the shift towards
greater group solidarity among the ethnic minorities, who pointed out that
"there ain't no black in the Union Jack".
However,
there were two other significant characteristics of the Scottish situation that
help us to understand why the nationalist movement emerged when it did.
Firstly, within the general crisis of the British economy Scotland had a
special if unenviable place. The Scottish economy had long been highly
dependent on both heavy industry (coal, steel, ship-building, heavy
engineering) and, given the difficulties of these industries, on Keynesian
forms of redistribution, including regional aid to declining areas. The 1970s
and 1980s not only saw the terminal decline of some of Scotland's traditional
industries, and the concomitant rise in unemployment, but also the crisis of
Keynesianism. Thus Scotland and the Scots were increasingly seen as being a
drag on public spending, dependency addicts within the British Welfare State.
Not only was the Scottish economy declining, but the victims of that decline
were increasingly perceived as being bothersome beggars, living off the
national purse.
If the
first economic factor to exacerbate nationalism was decline and the humiliation
that went with it, the second factor
was hope. In the late sixties oil was found in the Scottish waters of
the North Sea, and by the mid-seventies it was evident that the oil (after the
huge price increases decided by OPEC) represented substantial future wealth for
those who would benefit from it.
This was
the economic argument that the nationalists had been lacking, and in 1974 their
electoral victory owed much to their slogan "It's Scottish oil". The
discovery of the oil, and the expectations about what it could do for the
declining Scottish economy did much to anchor the nationalists on the Scottish
political scene. They became so much of a key feature on the Scottish political
scene that for the rest of the seventies the key problem of the other parties
was how to deal with the electoral and political threat that they now
represented. It was particularly problematic for the Labour party that was in
power in Westminster at the time (1974-1979) with only a precarious majority in
parliament and in need of all the support they could get from the small
parties, including the nationalists. This no doubt helps to explain the Labour
party's new constitutional proposals of 1979, in which they proposed to set up
national assemblies in Scotland and Wales with limited executive powers (within
a general framework of a maintained United Kingdom). These proposals were
however, as the result of pressure from within the Labour party itself, to be
submitted to national referenda in both countries involved, with a certain
number of strict conditions for success.
The
referendum proposal was in itself something of a constitutional novelty, as was
the condition that at least 40 per cent of registered voters would have to vote
for the proposed assemblies for the legislation to become effective. The result
has been described as a "fiasco"; in fact this period has gone down
in recent Scottish historiography as that of the "referendum fiasco".
In Wales a majority actually voted against the government proposals, and in
Scotland although a small majority voted "yes", the 40% rule
prevented the legislation from being introduced. The immediate political result
of the referendum was that the Scottish nationalists declared war
(metaphorically of course) on the Labour government, and within a few weeks the
government had fallen as a result of a Nationalist motion of no confidence that
was voted by the Tory opposition.
The 80s
were of course the years of triumphant Thatcherism in England. It was also
during this period that the evolution of Scottish politics began to
diverge increasingly sharply from what
was happening South of the border. Although the Nationalists went into
(short-lived) decline in the early and mid-eighties, the feeling of national
difference between Scotland and England and the rejection of Thatcherism as an alien
philosophy developed strongly. Scotland, in terms of voting behaviour became a
bastion of anti-Thatcherism, which expressed itself not only in the decline of
the Scottish Conservative vote but in the flourishing of an anti-liberal
culture (which we find impregnating everything from the rock music industry -
"She'll privatize your Granny if you give her half a chance" from Breadline
Britain - to the Glasgow novel).
Indeed,
this is perhaps the moment to evoke the “second cultural renaissance” which had
been accompanying once again the nationalist movement since the seventies.
Whereas the cultural production of the Twenties and Thirties had been dominated
by visions of Scotland’s rural past (Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil M. Gunn, Fionn
MacColla; Naomi Mitchison; Edwin Muir, etc.) the new and diverse cultural
movement was very much anchored in Scotland’s urban present. Of course, there
were writers from the rural areas who made their mark (George Mackay Brown from
Orkney or Iain Crichton Smith from the Highlands) but the central core of
Scottish cultural production was to be found in the big industrial cities.
Indeed, Glasgow was to play a crucial role as both background to and persona in
the new literature of William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, Liz
Lochead, and many others.
The
second half of the eighties was also a period of intense reflexion on
constitutional issues among a broad spectrum of political opinion in Scotland
(from the Church of Scotland to the Labour party). This led in 1989 to the
setting up of the umbrella organization, the Scottish Constitutional
Convention, whose proposals for a new constitutional arrangement between Scotland
and England were to serve as the main basis for the legislation introduced by
the New Labour government in 1997 and which led to a referendum on Scottish
autonomy (September 1997 and a general election for the new Scottish parliament (May 1999). Although the nationalists
refused to be associated with the Constitutional Convention and continued to
demand “independence in Europe”, they did nonetheless agree to campaign in
favour of the new Scottish assembly and its semi-autonomous fiscal powers.
What has
emerged from this process of
“self-rule” for Scotland is as yet a hybrid animal. : a Scottish
parliament has been reconvened in Edinburgh and now functions along lines which
are quite distinct from Westminster
(the Scottish electoral system,
with a combination of majority and
proportional represntation is a major departure form “first-past-the-post”).
The representation of women has been vastly improved and the “adversary” style
of the British House of Commons has
been more or less abandoned. Moreover, since the electoral system avoids the
over-representation of the dominant party, Labour has had to enter into a coalition with the Liberal Democrats,
which some observers have seen as a trial run for the same type of experiment
in the rest of Britain in the not-too-distant future.
Contemporary Scotland
Selective bibliography
Linda Colley, Britons. Forging the Nation, Pimlico, 1992
Christian Civardi, L’Ecosse depuis 1528, Ophrys, 1998
Tom Devine, The Scottish Nation 1700-2000, Penguin, 1999
William Ferguson, The Identity of the Scottish Nation. An Historic
Quest, Edinburgh University Press,
1998.
Christopher Harvie, Scotland.
A Short History, Oxford University
Press, 2002.
T.C. Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, Collins, 1986
Alice Brown, David McCrone, Lindsay Paterson, Paula Surridge, The
Scottish Electorate, Macmillan, 1999
Alice Brown, David McCrone, Lindsay Paterson, Politics and Society in
Scotland, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1998.
Keith Dixon (Ed.), L’Autonomie Ecossaise.
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