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Back to SOCIAL/ECONOMIC/POLITICAL Homepage Linklater’s ScotlandMagnus LinklaterColumnistFiled 24 Mar 05This article, which was
originally published in the Spectrum section of Scotland on Sunday
IT IS ten years since I started writing about Scotland for this paper (1). It is a good time to begin again - to get out and about and take a proper look at this strange, elusive country, which seems to be so deeply at odds with itself. I cannot remember a time when we have argued so furiously among ourselves. We are suffering a crisis of confidence, says Carol Craig. We revel in failure, says Stuart Cosgrove. We lack the spirit of enterprise, says every business survey. We drink too much, we eat the wrong food, we are idle, we are unadventurous. On the contrary, says Jack McConnell, we are the best small country in the world. Devolution was meant to be the settled will of the Scottish people. There are times when it sounds more like a pub brawl. This war of words, however, takes place in a relatively confined space. It is conducted in the corridors of Holyrood, the newsrooms of the nation's press, the studios of the BBC, and almost always within the confines of the central belt. Its protagonists defend old territory, its assailants fight on ground which is muddy with familiar argument. As William McIlvanney once wrote,
But what is it really talking about? Is it mired in the controversies that dominate the daily headlines, or is it simply getting on with its life? And if so, what is that life really like? My aim in writing this column will be to venture into the real Scotland, and try to take its temperature. I can hardly claim to do so objectively - you cannot be a Scot and remain entirely opinion-free - but I hope I am sufficiently curious to learn from what I see and hear rather than simply preach. There will be one driving prejudice, and that is a deep affection for the place I was born and brought up in. My father, Eric Linklater, who stood as a candidate for the newly formed National Party of Scotland at the famous East Fife by-election of 1933, wrote his novel Magnus Merriman based on that experience. In it, the self-doubting hero, Magnus, says,
I agree with that. It is a love that can be severely tested. Watching the progress of devolution from the press gallery of the Scottish Parliament has been a trying experience. The way it has so rapidly descended into the bear-pit of party politics without the redeeming feature of genuine reform is disillusioning for those who expected so much from it. But I am not among those who choose to belittle it. I know enough of its members to realise that they too would like it to do better, and in many ways it is beginning to rediscover itself. Much of what goes on there is buried beneath sneering headlines about graft and self-interest, of which there is, in fact, remarkably little. The building in which it operates is an architectural marvel. I still cannot quite believe that this cowering timorous country of ours has produced such an extravagant masterpiece, and it has achieved something that not many modern buildings do - it has won the affection of those who use it. There is no doubt, however, that it has polarised opinion elsewhere in Scotland. The divide between the body politic and the country at large has rarely yawned so wide. When I go north to Orkney, to the heartland of Perthshire, south to the Borders, or to the west, I come across that same streak of hearty contempt for politicians and all their works that seems to colour most social attitudes today. Yet what I also find is a Scotland that is rarely reported, where much of what is happening appears starkly to contradict the general air of malaise, where life has changed so dramatically within the past generation that I sometimes find it hard to recognise the Scotland I grew up in, and where the self-pity that the novelist Andrew O'Hagan once wrote about as the nation's defining characteristic seems wholly absent. Take Orkney, where I was born, which is about as far from Holyrood as you can get, and where resourcefulness is second nature. Its annual festivals, both arts and science, I take for granted; its new buildings in Kirkwall and Stromness are typical of Orcadian enterprise. What is more impressive is its ambition. The very idea of building a tunnel beneath the Pentland Firth, the wildest sea crossing in Britain, to join it to the mainland, would, 20 years ago, have seemed a joke. Now you have serious calculations being made by councillors on the basis of a £150 million project, with costs offset against the long-term investment needed to sustain a hard-pressed ferry service. I am sure there will be unholy rows to come, but I am equally sure that Orkney will have its tunnel. Where does this kind of thinking come from? Or take the argument back to Edinburgh itself. To follow the stories about botched traffic plans and soaring council tax, you would conclude that this was a city in decline. On the contrary, it is the fastest expanding in Britain, its financial centre among the five or six biggest in Europe, its northern seaboard development creating a virtual second city. This place too I find unrecognisable from the one I first came to back in the 1980s. Then it was a bitterly divided, gurning sort of town, uncertain about its cultural future, destined apparently to cede ground to the self-confidently expanding Glasgow, City of Culture 1990. What happened exactly to turn it around? This will not, I hasten to say, be a cruise round Scotland in rose-tinted spectacles. I want to look at those places which wrestle with drugs and violent crime as much as I want to celebrate success and achievement. The decline in so many values that we once thought of as being typically Scottish - the strength of the family, the loyalty to community, the commitment to education, the adherence to a faith - is every bit as marked a feature of the modern nation as rising house prices and falling unemployment. I intend to write about rural Scotland, which feels itself alienated by a range of legislation it regards as hostile to its way of life. I want to speak up for the nation's built heritage, and attack every supermarket that destroys a town centre. I will question environmental agencies that put birds before people, and inveigh against wind farms in the wrong places. I intend to come out with my own views about the arts before the Cultural Commission has got its boots on. I reserve the right to be rude about ludicrous lists of top 100 Scottish books that include Virginia Woolf and omit Allan Massie. If you detect a hint of grumpiness
here, then so be it. I agree with Gerry Hassan and Eddie Gibb, whose
book, Hopeful Stories for a Northern Nation, argues that there are
strong grounds for optimism in the years ahead. But there are still
many dragons to be slayed and quite a few windmills to be tilted
at. I am off in search of my nag. Magnus Linklater
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