Independence. Alasdair Gray
received in World War I, for which he wore an abdominal truss. Between the two world wars he had worked a box-cutting machine in a factory. He was a Fabian Socialist of the George Bernard Shaw and Webb sort until the British government’s pact with Hitler in 1938, when he joined the Communist Party, leaving it in 1939 when Stalin also signed a pact with Hitler. He and my mother were both literate and musical. My Scottish public schools (state funded, unlike what are called public schools in England) equipped me for a profession as my parents wished, so I had no sense of social inferiority. When writer in residence at Glasgow University I was amused when a lecturer in English from Oxford or Cambridge told me, “It is amazing that someone of your background knows as much about literature as we do.” Many Scots friends thought my learning considerable; none thought it strange that I had it. Nor had I a sense of national inferiority. I agreed with my dad in supporting the Labour Party, whose government after 1945 brought social equality nearer to everyone in Britain, by using everyone’s income tax to pay for national healthcare, further education and legal aid for those who could not afford these before. Both the Labour and Tory Parties seemed willing to turn the British Empire’s former colonies into self-governing, democratic parts of a global Commonwealth. I imagined history as a story of continual progress to fairer forms of social life, with British Socialist Democracy an example to both the USSR and USA.
This view was so dear to me that on hearing that a Scottish nationalist party existed, I thought that an entertaining joke. I was sixteen at the time and had never read or been told that Irish and Scottish Home Rule had, with social welfare for all, been the declared aims of the Labour Party’s founders in 1893. Only one thing inclined me to the SNP. My knowledge of geography was so bad that for years I had thought the populations of Scotland and England were roughly equal, so were equally represented in the London parliament. On hearing that both Scots and their MPs were a tenth of England’s, I saw that in any conflict of interest between these lands Scots MPs would be so obviously outvoted that there would be no point in them voting against the majority. This seemed less important than the need to keep the Labour Party strong enough to stop the Tories undoing the degree of social equality it had gained through Westminster. Many readers will know why I stopped believing that.
Like my parents I am still a Socialist of the Robert Owen, William Morris, Bernard Shaw and Sidney Webb kind, but love Scottish political independence more, like Robert Burns, John Maclean and Hugh MacDiarmid. For most of my life I have been in show business, making pictures, novels, verses and dramas, which has perhaps made me too playful. With the help of friends my work has always earned me enough to live comfortably, so I have only an onlooker’s experience of unpleasant work and politics. Being Glaswegian, my knowledge of the world outside that city is mostly got from books, films, conversations and shallow experiences of other places any visitor could acquire, but I believe my account of what I see as political corruption in Glasgow will be recognized as typical of other places by patriotic Islanders, Highlanders, Aberdonians and more.
One of my closest and most intelligent friends recently said in public that he would not vote in the coming referendum, because no resulting dominant party will challenge the capitalists ruling us. I still believe the vote can be a tool in choosing a government representing a majority of the electorate, but an almost useless tool in modern Britain and the USA where most of us can only choose between two parties managed by those whose wealth gives them nearly absolute power. That the Westminster parties have stopped representing many of us is shown by how few people in recent years still join them, and why the number of British non-voters has grown since the 1990s when Tony Blair announced that Labour was the party of the businessman. Everyone knew the Tory Party is that, so why vote for Tweedledum instead of Tweedledee? Leaders of both parties commit Britain’s armed services to fight beside the USA in nations whose natural resources are treated as, not the business of natives living there, but our business. In Hollywood movies of the 1930s Big Business was sometimes shown to be selfishly greedy. Marxists called it Capitalism. It had caused a worldwide financial depression which both the economics of Keynes and what President Roosevelt called the New Deal planned to cure by spending taxpayers’ money on public works. With the help of World War II these plans so succeeded that the USA, backed by Britain and some other states who think themselves democratic, has been fighting wars ever since, secretly or openly. The media told us these were being fought to save democracy. We now know they were fought to force the natural wealth of other continents into the international trading market the USA (with British support) dominated, and now shares with China. We now know this kind of trade and industry is poisoning the air, water and ground human life depends upon.
It will be hard for any nation to withdraw from what President Eisenhower in 1961 warned America against: the military-industrial complex. I now think the only resistance to that complex is an alliance of small nations co-operating to oppose the big military ones by pressing them to support the 1997 United Nations agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, to reduce carbon emissions. I hope an alliance of democracies could persuade millionaire politicians to take their weapons and armed forces out of other peoples’ lands and waters. I believe the Scots parliament is about to gain more independence from the London one, but fear it may get it on terms that prevent independent action and use of our natural, national wealth. As Adam Smith made plain in more than one book, the true wealth of a nation is in well-employed people.
This book is not written merely to promote the Scottish National Party. While glad that it now dominates a Scottish parliament and is working to make it more independent, I am appalled by some things it has allowed, especially changes to the Scots legal system made by the Cabinet Secretary for Justice Kenny MacAskill. There will be a chapter about that. I will try to write entertaining criticism of many things, not all of them Scottish. Nor will I waste time by discussing Scottish identity, as vague a ghost as the identity of any other millions of people.
I acknowledge the help of five settlers here: Timothy Neat from Cornwall, Sharon Blackie from England, David Knowles from Wales, Angel Mullane and Feargal Dalton from Ireland. Scots of independent minds also helped, especially my research assistant Mary McCabe. This book will end on a note of restrained Utopian hope. Only the clinically depressed have no hope for the future. Those trying to discourage it under the guise of realism are what were once called predeterminists. Even Thomas Malthus, that prolific Church of England clergyman, hoped his Essay on the Principle of Population would keep Britain in a better state by stopping the wealthy improving the living conditions of their employees. Though writing of many bad states this should not be a gloomy book. Some of it will be gossipy, without offence to anyone’s private life.
The coming chapters use passages from my other books, but few readers will have read or remembered them. The only exception is Professor Sidney Workman of Kirkcaldy College of Further Education, a critic who has always been out for my blood. Some chapters may seem like detours, especially the first, but all (I hope
entertainingly) circle back to one idea.
You have been warned.
1: Britain from a Waiting Room
HAVING SIGNED A CONTRACT to write this volume for Canongate Books in 2012, I almost at once saw it a duty I postponed tackling. I hate duties, especially those I impose on myself. I therefore avoided keeping up to date with the political state of Scotland and Britain by only reading The Times Literary Supplement and magazines in my doctor’s waiting room. I had an ailment which kept me visiting it steadily for two or three months.
I am fascinated by waiting-room reading matter. The doctor’s surgery of my childhood had bound volumes of Punch cartoons, none later than World War I, though there were hints of it coming. A cartoon showed an officers’ mess where a colonel asked a junior, “What, Captain so-and-so, do you see as the role of cavalry in modern warfare?” and was told, “I suppose, Sir, it will add tone to what would otherwise be a mere vulgar brawl.” In another officers discussed an un-named foreign country. One said, “Yes, we’ll have to fight them sooner or later. I only hope it isn’t in the grouse shooting and salmon fishing season.” In the aftermath of two world wars these amused and surprised me.
Later