Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Scotland has been putting on its spectacles with commendable eagerness to read
the minute print of a Red Paper or socialist symposium on the state of the
nation, which has reached the best-seller lists.1 It is a collection of twenty-eight
essays, edited by Edinburgh Universitys student rector, Gordon Brown, which
adds fresh laurels to those that the universitys enterprising Student Publication
Board has been winning of late.2 A dozen of the authors are academics, seven
writers or journaliststhough many are political activists as well. There are
two trade-unionists, two Labour MPS. Six pieces deal with social problems,
five with devolution, local government or administration, three with North Sea
oil, three others with industry and finance, three with land and the Highlands.
Despite the comprehensive investigation of Scotland and Scottish nationalism
contained in the book, some topics were bound to get left out. There might have
been something on religion and the Churches, considering how near at hand
Ulster is. There might have been something on women and the family. Sad to
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say, not a single one of all these writers is a woman. Still, their contributions, of very varying length, are all carefully thought out and well
documented.
It is a bleak picture of Scotland that emerges. Wages have been catching
up with English levels in the past decade, but unevenly, so that one
million Scots can still be reckoned poor; in fact a quarter of the population has missed its share of recent improvement (Ian Levitt, pp. 317,
331). Two areas in particular are still floundering, Glasgow and the
Highlands. Ian Carter discusses Highland society as one based on
extreme inequalities (pp. 247 ff.), and John McEwen comments on its
degraded condition . . . in the hands of powerful, often anti-social
landlordism (p. 262). Scottish landlords have always been mostly
Scots. Likewise, if Scottish housing is often still bad, Robin Cook reminds us that responsibility in this field has always been in Scottish
hands, so that to put the blame on English domination is absurd (p.
335). Scotlands employment of the social services, as unified in 1969,
has been more sluggish and parsimonious than that of either England
or Wales (Richard Bryant, p. 344).
As for Scottish business leaders, it is very obvious that the countrys
development cannot safely be left to them. More capital is raised per
head than in England, but the small number of men who manipulate it
have displayed their efficiency by channelling a large part of it abroad
(Ray Burnett, p. 116; John Scott & Michael Hughes, p. 183). It appears
that this native or interior bourgeoisie has too little freedom from
more powerful interests, in London or elsewhere, to take independent
decisions (John Firn, p.165; Scott and Hughes, p.171), even if it had any
inclination to take decisions with the welfare of Scotland in view
which there is nothing to suggest. Nearly 40 per cent of Scottish manufacturing is under English and nearly 15 per cent under North American
control.
By demanding jobs at any cost, Brown considers that Scotland has been
reducing itself to a colony (p. 13). A few years ago Felix Greene was predicting a revolt of European workers against the overlordship of
American capital. There has been little sign of this happening. Worker
and capitalist are so far apart in any case that the one may not care
whether the other lives a mile away, or in London, or in New York or
Tokyo. But North Sea oil has put things in a new light. Scots are confronted now by foreigners coming to carry off a precious national possession, paying as little as possible for it and doing a good deal of
damage in the process. The depredations of the oil companies in
Scotland have been on a par with their operations in the Middle East,
David Taylor writes (p. 270) in a study of the dislocations caused to
local communities. Some contributors are sceptical of even the potential
economic benefits to be derived from oil, and suggest that the prosperity so many Scots have seen rising like Venus from the foam is only a
mirage. But a strong case is made for nationalization of oil, as a means
of making the most of whatever it has to give. Peter Smith argues
1
The Red Paper on Scotland, ed. Gordon Brown, EUSPB, Edinburgh 1975.
Notably, by its publication of three special issues of New Edinburgh Review on
Antonio Gramsci.
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further that effective planning can only take shape through full public
control of all fuels, so that their uses can be integrated and market
fluctuations countered (pp. 188, 207). Let us hope there will be some
oil left by the time the planners are able to set to work. Understandably,
the other item recommended most decidedly for public ownership is
that still more vital natural resource, land. McEwen has made a painstaking tabulation of private estates and their owners. It is, as he says,
scandalous that Scotland has no full official register of land-holdings;
any proposal for one has always been resisted (p. 262; cf. Jim Sillars,
p. 255).
Several writers proclaim their faith in the capacity of the working class
to cope with the task. John McGrath declares that the Scottish working
class is one of the strongest in Europe, and firmly internationalist, and
that a section of it has a very high political level (pp. 138, 140). John
Foster credits the working class with a distinctive character, fostered by
two centuries of internationalism, and with a culture of its own, the
sole living one in Scotland in an age when Scottish bourgeois culture
only exists in totally artificial ersatz form (p. 150). Taylor argues for
independence as the political fulfilment of Scottish labour culture
(p. 128). In this context the term culture is not easily defined. Brown
laments, as he well may, that after all these years Scotland has no
socialist book club, no socialist labour college . . . only a handful of
socialist magazines and pamphlets (p. 18). If any large part of the
working class wanted such things, Scotland would have them. Undeniably the socialist movement in Scotland, of whose beginnings
James Young supplies a graphic outline, has produced a remarkably
fine type of trade-union activist, usually to be met with in the Communist Party. They are ardently internationalist, and not without some
interest in theory. Such men and women represent the labour intelligentsia that Gramsci wanted to see. Unfortunately they are very few and
have no deep political influence on the mass of Scottish workers.
Nationalist Challenge
Today Scottish socialists are confronted with a fresh riddle, the sudden
spurt put on by their long-neglected rival Scottish nationalism. A
serious ferment of nations or nationalities is widespread in Europe,
both West and East; even in the Soviet Union there are stirrings, nearly
sixty years after the revolution. Tom Nairn, whose essay is the longest
in this collection and one of the most exploring and rewarding, is the
contributor with most to say about this phenomenon, though he confines himself to western Europe. Socialisms failure to take the lead has
made this second round of bourgeois nationalism inevitable (p. 47).
It has besides neglected the problem of nationalities for too long. Nairn
recalls the Marxist debate of the years before 1914, centred on the
Hapsburg empire with its jarring peoples (p. 53). It would be well worthwhile to reconsider the polemics of those years. Subsequently, with the
Hapsburg and Ottoman empires broken up, and that of the Tsars transformed into the USSR, that stage of history seemed to have been left
behind. Until quite lately there was little more Marxistor any other
thinking on the subject; it was left to socialists in the colonial-national
movements.
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Some common essences can be discovered in national feeling everywhere, but it is capable of numberless variations; what is of practical
importance is its character in a particular country, as conditioned by
history, geography, religion and so on. Various broad groupings can
be usefully made. Regionalism, of which there has been much talk
lately, may be distinguished from neo-nationalismthe term preferred by Nairn. The former has been seen, plausibly, as a recoil from
the stresses of a too big, too complex world, a groping towards more
local, familial ties. This regionalism is associated with areas that have
had no earlier political existence of their own, or only a far-off and
shadowy one, like Languedoc or Corsica.
Wales and Brittany may belong to an intermediate category. These are
nationalities with languages of their own, but no earlier life as authentic
States to look back on. Indeed the idea of the State, which Latin
peoples and through them the Germanic derived from Rome, and
Russia from Byzantium, seems to have been as alien to the whole Celtic
fringe of north-west Europe as to most of Africa. Wales with its petty
principalities was conquered by England in the thirteenth century.
Brittanys medieval annals were filled chiefly with contests for the
dukedom by rival outsiders; from being a vassal of the French crown,
it was more fully incorporated into France shortly before the middle of
the sixteenth century. A few years earlier Wales had been deprived of its
distinctive laws and administration, whereas Brittany still had its own
representative assembly down to 1789.
Some other movements can be called fully nationalist, and since
national consciousness in their territories has had a continuous existence, in one guise or another, the term neo-nationalist is only appropriate to them in the sense that they wish to revive a bygone political
autonomy. Catalonia has not stood by itself as a State since far back in
the middle ages; but linked with Aragon, and later through Aragon
with Castile, it preserved a form of home rule down to the early
eighteenth century; and both before and after this date it waged protracted armed struggles to defend or regain its fueros or constitutional
rights. In the early nineteenth century these struggles were mixed up
with reactionary Carlism, somewhat as the last resistance of the Highlands was mixed up with Jacobitism. There was then a long and complex transition, Catalonia becoming Spains biggest industrial base,
class tensions interacting with national feeling, a bourgeoisie seeking to
exploit this and hostile classes throwing up rival nationalist parties.
Something similar was taking place in a part of the Basque area.
Navarre had been an independent kingdom down to 1512, and under
the crown of Castile both it and the Vascongadas, the three neighbouring Basque provinces, retained a wide measure of self-government
down to the 1840s. They lay outside the Spanish customs line; they had
privileged exemptions from taxation and conscription. Basques as well
as Catalans fought for Don Carlos and their threatened fueros, and
Navarre, inland and conservative, remained Carlist. The Vascongadas
and Catalonia recovered their autonomy within the Second Republic,
only to lose it once more when Franco triumphed in 1939. Ever since
then bitterness has been sharpened by vicious repression under a dic96
tatorship which has never forgotten how they fought against it in the
Civil War.
Nairns Thesis
that the Covenanters of 1637 were rebelling against the English government, not against England: far from wanting to break off the connection established in 1603, they were desirous of closer links with
England, economic links among them. Foster observes that their
sense of the need for an English guarantee against feudal reaction led to
the dangerous persistence of their interventions in English politics in
the period of the civil wars (p. 144).
To all this the Union of 1707 was a logical sequel. It came when a
Scottish dynasty still wore the two crowns and, as Foster says, it was
unequal but non-colonial (p. 145). England was not annexing a market,
or cornering raw materials. Its motives were strategicBritain was
engaged in a great European conflict, as it was again a century later
when union was imposed on Ireland. In form, at any rate, union was not
imposed on Scotland but negotiated, whatever jiggerypokery went
into the bargaining. There had been unions by agreement before: the
Kalmar Union of the Scandinavian countries in 1397, the Union of
Lublin between Poland and Lithuania in 1569. But this one came later
and, if highly undemocratic, was at any rate not an affair of cliques of
feudalists. In many ways it might be called a model arrangement.
Scotland conserved a remarkable amount of autonomy, Nairn recognizes (p. 43). A very few years before Catalonia lost its fueros, Scotland
was left in possession of its own official Church, its own law and lawcourts, its own educationto which it has added the bank-notes that
so puzzle foreign visitors.
Regional Survivals
Scotland was far better off in its new condition than in its old one.
Scots who welcomed the Union were influenced by their private
interests, just as some Welshmen had favoured incorporation in England because they stood to profit by it. Similarly in Navarre in the
late eighteenth century, as a local historian Rodrguez Garraza has
lately shown,4 many were moving towards acceptance of incorporation
in Spain as in line with modernity and progress. But if some Scots were
likely to gain, not many others were likely to lose. The poor were so
poor that they could scarcely be any worse off, even if patriotism or
xenophobia kept them suspicious of the new dispensation for a long
time. Union helped to make Scotland part of the Europe of the Enlightenment, which seemed to be turning away from narrow national
prejudice. Its own contribution to a cosmopolitan civilization was
remarkable, and may have owed much to its position as a country still
very conscious of itself, but liberated from the fetters and feuds of its
past and not yet too deeply committed to Englands imperial future.
Hume lived for years in France, Boswell studied in Holland.
Nairn devotes a valuable page or two (pp. 33 ff.) to Scott, who stands
at the end of this period of flowering of the Scottish mind. He is a huge
enigma in the way of any comprehension of the Scottish make-upa
good man, a good Scotsman, a magnificent novelist when he wrote
about Scotland, a virulent Tory. Unhappily few Scots read him nowadays, though others still do. Some blame for this falls on radicals who
have failed to come to terms with his great and his bad qualities.
George Borrow was more open-minded; he hated Scotts Toryism as
much as anyone, but at the end of one of his Gypsy books he is trudging
off in rain and mist from Kirk Yetholm to Dryburgh Abbey to pay his
respects at Scotts tomb. After Sir Walters epoch, economic growth
and partnership in empire went on apace, while a distinctive Scottish
cultural or intellectual life flagged. Chimney-barons, always a more or
less philistine lot, replaced an educated gentry in the ascendancy, and
the landowning class was increasingly anglicized. A labour movement
was emerging and joining forces with labour south of the Border. Amid
this dissolution of the old society, literature was left stranded. In an
attractive study of the radical literary tradition, David Craig finds it thin
and spasmodic all the way from Burns to MacDiarmid (p. 290). Nairn
can hardly find words strong enough to condemn the Scottish subculture of tartanry and twaddlecramped, stagnant, backward-looking, parochial (p. 25)of which he must have imbibed an intense dislike when he lived in his native land.
Survival as a distinct society without a State of its own must, he thinks,
have had a painful, a kind of schizophrenic, effect (pp. 434). This may
be reading modern consciousness into the past. The trauma of common
life was rather the incessant breaking up of family ties and friendships
by emigration. Scotlands exceptional status of loose attachment to a
bigger neighbour was highly favourable to what has been the principal
vocation of Scots since the sixteenth century, if not earlier. They were
pulled abroad by the lure of a better living, pushed by archaic con4
R. Rodrguez Garreza, Tensiones de Navarra con la administracin central (1778-1808),
Pamplona 1974.
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ditions of life at home which would have changed more quickly and
thoroughly in every generation if multitudes had not escaped from
them by going away. There are still many who would rather live in
England, or anywhere else, than be cooped up within social and mental
horizons they feel to be suffocatingly narrow. There is and always has
been, in short, a Scottish anti-nationalism, or national anti- Scottishness,
as well as today a Scottish national movement.
Lost Ancestors
Speculations about Scotlands earlier, pre-imperial history are fascinating to the student, and ought by all means to be carried on, but there
are good reasons why they have only a very limited bearing on Scottish
opinion as it is now. Urban-industrial life robs the unlettered of their
folk memory, education is apt to give them only an artificial pseudomemory in exchange. Most of Scottish history has the special disadvantage of lying far away, swathed in mummy-wrappings of thoughts
and feelings remote from ours. Wallace and Bruce are only a few
degrees less mythical than King Arthur, in spite of patriotic pilgrimages
to Bannockburn, and they have long been heroes of the English
schoolroom as much as of the Scottish. It was in the Reformation and
the seventeenth-century battles to defend and enlarge it that Scotland
revealed grandeur; but because of its backward features and social
distortions those immortal longings could find expression only
through a theology so dense that it disguised their inner force and
meaning even from men of that day, and to minds of our day renders
them impenetrable. Hence, while all peoples nowadays suffer from
generation gaps in trying to comprehend their ancestors, few are so
completely cut off from them as the Scots.
Embers of an old romantic patriotism or nostalgia were fanned by the
World War, and by the time it was over some very gifted writers
were inspired by the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection
for their country. Hope soon faded. For one thing, it had little of the
bitterness of vulgar nationalism to feed it. The Red Paper very seldom
indulges in rhetoric, but there is an unreal sound in talk of an ever-present groundswell of resentment against the English and the domination
which they have imposed to the point, it seems to some, of colonial
oppression (McGrath, p. 136). If this resentment really exists, an
Englishman can live in Scotland for a very long time, as he could not live
in British India for a day, without discovering it.
The literary renaissance soon petered out for want of encouragement.
Few Scots read Burns, though many drink him in, so to speak, on his
birthday. Very few read MacDiarmid, or at any rate put their hands in
their pockets to buy him, though some are vaguely pleased to think of
their country possessing a poet of established reputationas Dr
Grimstone described Aeschylus to his pupils. Todays national revival
owes no debt to and feels no responsibility for anything so unworldly
as literature; Brown cites MacDiarmids attack on its philistinism (p.
17). Its leading thought is unquestionably Oil; a vision of pie not in the
sky, but close at hand, in the sea. Nairn argues that the economic interdependence of our world rules out anything like autarky (p. 651).
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Ramsay Macdonald and the Labour Party were talking of half a century
ago, or Dominion Status, with a Scottish presence in the Commonwealth. Whatever the name, two nations so closely akin, side by side in
one island, and probably both members of the EEC (to say nothing of
NATO), would have willy-nilly to keep many old links, or find new
ones. There would be an open frontier, like the Canadian-American one.
For the City of London an economic relationship like that between the
USA and Canada would be quite satisfactory. For its political arm there
would be consolation in the prospect of Tory election majorities in
England.
Questions like these have been little stirred in Scotland. Nationalists
tacitly assume that whatever degree of separation Scotland asks for will
be granted. English reactions are not the concern of the Red Paper,
whose writers are debating the perspectives for socialism in Scotland.
Still, the environment they are working in is already changing, and may
soon be altered far more drastically. It occurs to one of them, and might
have occurred forcibly to others, that a socialist Scotland on its own
would find survival very difficult (David Gow, p. 66). Powerful forces
would be brought to bear to destabilize it, from both sides of the
Atlantic. It is over Scottish nationalism, in any case, that the contributors most strenuously disagree. For some of them, as for many socialists everywhere, to have any truck with nationalism would be dabbling
in magic, turning back from astronomy to astrology. Scotlands bane
is not rule from London, the editor insists, but the uneven and uncontrolled development of capitalism (pp. 78). We are being made to
argue about the wrong things, according to Ronald Young: The
nationalist debate has been a serious distraction (p. 69). The way to
genuine national independence, argues McGrath, can only be through
greater and greater emphasis on socialist internationalism (p. 140).
But this will look to most voters a very long road to prosperity, a
voyage to the Islands of the Blessed by way of the Arctic. Vincent
Cable seems to hesitate (p. 244); Gow hedges, and concedes that a
National road to socialism need not be objected to so long as it is
fully internationalist and democratic (p. 68)attributes not readily
measured or guaranteed. Bob Tait goes the whole hog and is for recognition of nationalism as a progressive force (p. 125). Scots require
independence for the sake of control over their own affairs, and by
taking part in a Scottish government the Left would be able to work
towards direction of capital and to restructure an indigenous economy
(pp. 126, 129). It might be enquired why the Left in free England has
been so little able to bridle capital or keep its economy indigenous.
Nairn, who frankly confesses his surprise at the march of events (pp.
49 ff.), is the readiest to conclude that there is no choice left now:
socialists will have to adjust themselves to a triumph of nationalism.
His one hope of it rising above vulgar xenophobia lies in the EEChe
is a good European; membership will counteract the worst tendencies.
Scotland should stay in the Market at all costs, and help to build it up
into a federation (pp. 501). One or two others are more prepared than
he is to make a virtue of necessity, and contemplate nationalism as a
way out of stalemate. Nations can, as Tait observes, be vehicles that
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looks denatured, as Gordon Brown writes (p. 8). It is all the more encouraging that so much moral urgency is revived, as well as so much
talent mobilized, in this volume, and combined with so much sober
realism. Also that it was possible to gather socialists of such very
diverse affiliations to produce it. A coming together like this is less
awkward in Scotland, where something of the family atmosphere of a
small country still lingers, than it would be in England. A more
heterogeneous family gathering is to take place before long, when a
Scottish Assembly meets. It is to meet in an old Edinburgh school hall
designed as an exact replica of a temple at Athens, the Edinburgh of the
south. Enthusiasts will expect it to reproduce with equal fidelity the
wisdom and eloquence of ancient Greece. Cynics will look on an
imitation temple as the right meeting-place for an imitation parliament.
At the moment the safest prophecy is that those who live longest will
see most.
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