Independence of the Scottish Mind

Elite Narratives, Public Spaces and the Making of a Modern Nation

G. Hassan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137414144
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This study explores modern Scotland and examines how Scottish politics, culture and identities have interacted within the national and international contexts in the last thirty years. It considers which voices and opinions have proven influential and defining and charts the boundaries of public conversation to and beyond the independence referendum

Part I

The Long Revolution

1

Investigating Scotland: Public Life, Sphere and Voices

Introduction

Scotland, the UK and most of the world exist within what is perceived and presented as a time of change, uncertainty and continual flux. This is partially true, but is contained in an ideological account of economics and power that sees globalisation and the forces shaping it as inevitable, all-powerful and irresistible (Friedman, 2005; Eckersley, 2004). Yet an inarguable truth is undeniable – that this era has seen unprecedented change take place, conventional assumptions challenged, and new forms of power and protest emerge (Ryan, 2010; Castells, 2012).

What can therefore be acknowledged is that these opinions genuinely reflect contemporary shifts in the ideas and practices of politics, of political philosophies, of public life and of the public(s); how policies, ideas and issues are discussed, framed and understood; and why in Scotland it may be the case that many issues are not discussed and are instead marginalised and silenced. To begin this exploration, it is important to consider some of the meanings of Scotland – the main site for investigation.

The long revolution of Scotland as a political community

The context and evolution of Scotland needs to be fully understood in its historical development, influence and interface with other agencies, such as the British state and polity and its changing role as a political actor within the framework of the UK. This context will facilitate insights on concepts and understandings of Scotland within public and political discourse – its history, concerns, influence and reach, and what that contains, excludes and implies.

Scotland, post-union, was never abolished or under serious threat as a nation, given the intricate historical agreement and compromise that was the Acts of Union of 1706–7, which guaranteed the autonomy of Scottish civil society (Nairn, 1975 and 1977; Whatley, 2007). However, running in parallel to Scotland as a separate entity, there were several assimilationist projects – from the ‘North Briton’ aspirations of the Victorian Scots bourgeoisie, to the homogenisation of British politics, at the high point of the appeal of the Conservative and Labour parties in the 1940s and 1950s. The re-emergence of Scotland, however, as a distinct and assertive political place, space and player can be traced back to the end of the 19th century and the sudden appearance of the territorial question in British politics, aided by the rise of the Irish home rule question, expansion of the state and related discussions in liberal, progressive circles about the nature of government, and wider reflections on the nature of the imperial centre, which synthesised concerns and pressures from Ireland, Scotland and the Empire (Fry, 1987; Loughlin, 1986).

This period saw the establishment of the Scottish Office in 1885, a significant move at a Scottish and UK level representing the first territorial office of the British Government in the UK (the Welsh Office not being established until 1965 and the Northern Irish Office not until 1972). It represented north of the border the recognition and legitimation of Scotland as a distinct administrative and governmental space within the UK, and would, therefore, contribute to the different dynamics and pressures that led to further change.

From its inception the Scottish Office slowly went about gathering new powers and status, expanding its reach into diverse niches of society. In 1926 the post of Secretary for Scotland, created to oversee the government office in 1885, became the Secretary of State for Scotland, and in 1938–9 a Scottish Office reorganisation saw certain boards and departments merged and rationalised, while the new Scottish Office premises in Edinburgh, St. Andrew’s House (from 1999 offices of the Scottish First Minister and the Scottish Government), opened in September 1939 (Mitchell, 2003; Torrance, 2005).

The period of Walter Elliot, Tory Secretary of State for Scotland (1936–8), Thomas Johnston, Labour Secretary of State in the wartime Churchill Government (1941–5) and the Attlee Government (Joseph Westwood, Arthur Woodburn, Hector McNeil) witnessed a period of immense expansion, centralisation and rationalisation. The war saw Johnston’s role effectively turned into the equivalent of a Scottish Prime Minister, while the post-war growth of public spending and the welfare state gave enormous resources and clout to the Scotland Office, with education, housing and health devolved – the latter requiring separate legislation to set up the NHS.

This expansion of Scottish administration and government had a number of complex consequences. For one, it accelerated the creation of a distinct Scottish public space and sphere in which the main subjects of public life were increasingly talked about in a Scottish context or frame of reference. While in the immediate years of the post-war era, from 1945–66 these discussions were also within an environment in which the British context was assumed as a given, seen as a guarantee of redistribution of resources and as an enabler on the road to progress. This realm of territorial politics sitting within and without the system was to ultimately contribute towards the erosion of this British compact.

From the earliest post-war period the importance and role of the Scottish Office led to calls for greater accountability and democratic control of the institutions of government in Scotland. During the Attlee administration, Scottish Tories protested what they saw as the centralisation of nationalising Scottish companies and stood against what they perceived as ‘the London rule’ of socialists (Mitchell, 1990). Labour – at this juncture in office, then as opposition from 1951–64 and then in office from 1964 – was explicitly anti-home rule and pro-centralisation, while presenting the muscle of the Scottish Office as allowing the Scots to get the best of both worlds.

These dynamics of the Scottishisation of Scottish political and public life, the role of the Scottish Office as an effective insider pressure group in Westminster and Whitehall, and the critical role of ‘the Scottish lobby’, all contributed to aiding a politics of differentiation between Scotland and the rest of the UK. Yet without the crisis in the post-war that managed consensus from the mid-1970s onwards and without the election of the Thatcher Government and onset of Thatcherism, the unravelling of the carefully constructed system of negotiation and incorporation which worked in Scotland and in the union, may have lasted longer. But the experience of 1979–97 convinced a significant majority of Scots that they wanted more of a say on the priorities and politics of public life (Brown et al., 1999; Taylor, 1999).

Less understood is the relationship between the Scottish Office pre-devolution, this Scottish public space and sphere, wider society and democracy. The experience of the Scottish Office generated three distinct and interrelated trends; the expansion of government and state, this leading to rising public expectations, an increased Scottish dimension and calls for more accountability and democratic voice, while all of this expansion accelerated processes of centralisation, standardisation, the withering of local government and decentralised arrangements. These processes have continued and accelerated under the Scottish Parliament and devolution, with numerous areas of public life streamlined or amalgamated, one pertinent example being the creation of Police Scotland from regional police forces.

Another example over the longer view concerns local government. In 1894 elected parish councils were introduced leading to what Allan McConnell calls a ‘complex and diverse system’ which, by the start of the 20th century, comprised 869 parish councils, 33 county councils and 200 burgh councils (2004: 46); 1918 and 1929 rationalisations, the latter abolishing parish councils, produced 176 small burgh councils, 21 large burgh councils, 33 county councils and 196 district councils (2004: 47). Further reorganisations in 1973 produced 53 district councils, nine regional authorities and three island authorities; in 1995 this was changed to 32 single-tier local authorities, with financial pressures to reduce the number further.

This is not an attempt to propose a golden age of Scottish democracy, but the opposite. Throughout the reconfiguration and remaking of Scottish public space, Scotland never completely embraced becoming a fully-fledged functioning parliamentary democracy. Instead, Scotland was to all intents and purposes a carefully controlled, managed society run by a narrow range of increasingly managerial elites. Indeed, the main set of changes from the Scotland of late Victorian times until now is arguably the transition from a set of aristocratic and upper class elites with significant landed wealth to various elites of institutions, expertise and political parties often shaped by patronage. Forthcoming chapters will explore the effect of this conscious decision to not embrace democratisation on Scottish public life and spaces.

These factors shape the Scottish political environment and policy community to this day. The Labour Party in post-war times have been hugely influenced by positioning themselves as the advocate for the Scottish public sector and government, being seen by many critics as transforming into a party of the nomenklatura (Kerevan, 2002; Macwhirter, 2002). The Scottish National Party (SNP) who, for decades, comprised institutional outsiders in public life were transformed by the platform and the focus of the Scottish Parliament, and since entering office in 2007 the SNP have shifted from embracing localism and small town Scotland to carrying forward continued rationalisation in police and other public services (Lynch, 2013; Pittock, 2014; Gallagher, 2009; Mitchell, 2009a; Mitchell et al., 2012).

The response of the Scottish press and broadcast media to political change

These developments and patterns have enormous consequences for Scottish public life, including the mainstream press and broadcasters. Large parts of the Scottish mainstream press originate in the age of a class-ridden society and gave voice to a confident unionist bourgeoisie, of the working classes knowing their place, of the British Empire, of an ordered and hierarchical society and much more. This began to change over the arc of the 20th century with universal suffrage and the establishment of the welfare state, while a revolutionary moment in retrospect was the advent of first BBC and then STV broadcasting TV programmes in Scotland. Both TV channels initially played safe in the managed, closed order that defined most of Scotland, but their very presence shook things up. That combined with the emergence of the SNP as a serious electoral force from 1967 onwards, and the rise of the Scottish dimension of politics and public life began to produce dramatic and far-reaching change.

This scale of change, a sort of equivalent Scottish ‘quiet revolution’, has proved taxing for the mainstream press by and large and for broadcasters to adapt to and thrive in. Future chapters explore how well Scottish journalists, media practitioners and opinion formers adapted to the new era of post-deference, rising aspirations and challenging authority through positing a range of examples and case studies covering politics to culture.

This book will also attempt to put into context, and to subject to a wider analysis, the experience of the establishment of the Scottish Parliament – the Labour-Lib Dem Executive who governed for the eight years of 1999–2007 and then the SNP Government from 2007 onwards, first as a minority, then majority administration. It is concerned with how these forces have fared in their relations and contests with institutional Scotland, where policy and ideas have come from, and how the public articulation and perceptions of this via newspapers, television and other vehicles.

This study has been conducted against the above backdrop: the longer term transformation of Scottish public life; the experience in the immediate past period of setting up the Scottish Parliament; most recently and concurrently, the debate on Scottish independence following the SNP’s 2011 election victory; and then the ‘Edinburgh Agreement’ between the Scottish and UK Governments paving the way for a historic vote on Scotland’s constitutional status in 2014. This environment has informed the research and writing of this work – a febrile Scottish debate which has drawn wider UK and international interest and that has affected a large number of the people I have interviewed and spoken with, along with media and public institutions I have surveyed. This background along with the aims of this study gives the work a wider context and resonance. Those individuals who step out of the crowd to comment and opine upon the behaviours, thoughts and actions of others – namely the commentariat, of whose activities and origins this work is concerned – will first be considered.

The rise and fall of intellectual work

The Scottish political commentariat and wider policy community are involved in ideas, engagement and thinking. While they are not all part of an intelligentsia per se, in that they are not necessarily feted as recognised authorities, they engage in intellectual work, and some (whether academics, thinkers or writers) can clearly be seen as intellectuals. The concept of the intellectual, however, has been a troublesome one for many, enticing suspicion and charges from the French Revolution and Edmund Burke onwards. Zygmunt Bauman offers the following description:

The intentional meaning of ‘being an intellectual’ is to rise above the partial preoccupation of one’s own profession or artistic genre and engage with the global issues of truth, judgement and taste of the time. The line dividing ‘intellectuals’ and ‘non-intellectuals’ is drawn and redrawn by decisions to join in a particular mode of activity. (Bauman, 1987: 2)

Edward Said offers that ‘intellectuals are individuals with a vocation, for the art of representing whether that is talking, writing, teaching, appearing on television’ (1994: 10). The role of the intellectual has dramatically changed in contemporary capitalism, with the expansion of the state, mass communications, and notions of economic and political power being fundamentally reconfigured. Pierre Bourdieu sees intellectual ideas and power as representing ‘symbolic power’, while Erik Olin Wright presents intellectuals as occupying a ‘contradictory class locations’ between the working class and bourgeoisie; the context can be seen as the instruments of communication and knowledge becoming in effect instruments of a form of power (Bourdieu, 1979; Wright, 1979). Jurgen Habermas posited the rise of an intellectual stratum in the West as being connected to the emergence of the market economy, constitutional state and bourgeois public sphere (Elliott, 1982; Schlesinger, 1982).

Dramatic changes in politics, economic power and ideologies in the last 30 to 40 years have had consequences for the intelligentsia and how the term is perceived. Alvin Gouldner saw ‘the rise of a new class’ (1979), while others, in Nicholas Garnham’s words, noted the emergence of a class of ‘post-Enlightenment intellectuals’ (2000: 93); Bauman saw in postmodernity a shift from the role of the intellectual as a legislator to an interpreter, the former making authoritative statements to elites and the public, the latter facilitating communication and guiding conversations and knowledge between differing groups (1987: 4–5).

There are other views. Frank Furedi, for example, is sceptical of the claims of post-Enlightenment perspectives, believing they are shaped by cynicism, ‘fear of appearing elitist’ and ‘the new populism’. He writes:

The real issue is not whether or not academics have a public role to play. The question is whether they have a public to interact with. And that to a considerable extent depends on how seriously they take the public and how seriously they take ideas. (Furedi, 2003)

Furedi’s project in his book, ‘Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?’, is to question the assumptions behind democratising public life being seen as an advance. Instead, Furedi sees a western culture and its elites in a profound crisis of confidence, namely that ‘The lack of affirmation for the elite’s authority has led to a situation where the elite finds it difficult to summon up conviction in its own mission’ (2004: 149). He finds examples of this difficulty in the BBC, at Harvard and other US universities and in the world of politics, but he does not directly deal with the rise of the neoliberal, market fundamental elite in the western world, so eager is he to dismiss the last remains of a left of any kind.

Raymond Williams described, in his seminal work, ‘Keywords’, the existence of resistance and suspicion of intellectuals as founded on ‘groups engaged in intellectual work, who in the course of social development had acquired some independence from established institutions, in the church and in politics’ (1983: 170). In the subsequent ‘New Keywords’ John Frew defined intellectual as ‘the developing class position of what might be called knowledge workers’...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: The Scottish Debate and the Crises of Britain
• Part I  The Long Revolution
• Part II  Stories of Modern Scotland
• References
• Index