THIS BOOK HAS surveyed and assessed a social landscape, politics and civic culture in Scotland that has undergone far reaching changes over the past twenty years, partly spurred by the devolution settlement and the genesis of the Scottish Parliament, and partly stretching well beyond the formal fabric of both.
Without doubt there has been a remaking of politics, power and who has voice during the past two decades. At the same time, there has been (of course) both continuity and discontinuity across the public sphere. But within all of that, it feels as if something fundamental has shifted. The idea of Scotland as ‘a village’ in political terms, a place where those with the contacts and influence take the decisions and others acquiesce, has been challenged and disturbed. It has been shown to be both limiting and false; a kind of corporatized, incorporated society that benefits the governing classes and civic tribes, rather than releasing energy and empowering communities to play a significant part in shaping their own destiny.
On the retreat too are many of the self-ingested caricatures and restrictions associated with Scotland being assigned (and dismissed) as belonging to a ‘Celtic fringe’ – a term which presupposes a range of common features and characteristics in the various peoples so labelled. It also implies an essentially dependent relationship between an assumed core and a designated periphery with another part of ‘the British Isles’, lowland England. The term, it should be noted, is
essentially an English and metropolitan – and so outsider – construct. It also brings with its considerable ideological baggage arising out of England’s historically fraught relations [and]… a pattern of English colonisation and cultural imperialism (Ellis, 2003).
Of course, the two decades marked by the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and a significant re-claiming of Scottish affairs within Scotland have not seen the ‘cultural cringe’ disappear entirely. The interpretation of the Brexit vote by many in England shows that attempts to marginalise Scotland are still alive (and that they are often not about Scotland). This peripheralization and regionalisation of Scotland has accelerated at Westminster post-Brexit vote as the British political classes and unionism has seemed to give up trying to understand and govern the divided kingdom that is the UK.
Moreover, there has been a profound shift in political gravity in the UK with two contradictory trends: the accumulation of power and status in a London-centric view of the world, and the development of alternative political centres of power in Edinburgh and Cardiff (and Belfast until the recent suspension of Stormont). Scotland’s now assertive political autonomy and voice will not and cannot be reversed, but whatever our constitutional effect, we will have to continue living on a set of islands where ‘the London-effect’ – the interests of a political and economic elite – has huge impact on us.
The key challenge at the end of this collection of essays is the task of beginning to assess, on the basis of an acknowledgment of the broad trends identified over the past twenty years, how we can more effectively embrace the Scotland of the future. This entails looking at how and where we can have more open conversations, creating spaces to develop thinking, ideas and practices which are grounded in real change and which go beyond superficialities and sound bites.
As noted in the introductory chapter, and as has become evident throughout the book, the futurescape of Scotland is being created every day in the here and now. This is an enormous positive. It is happening in thousands of ways, both small and unidentified and large and acknowledged, across the length and breadth of the country. These changes are not simply an epiphenomenon of the generation of a set of devolved institutions over twenty years, but about changes in both consciousness and agency brought about by civic and cultural engagement – a practical politics which refuses to be defined or appropriated by ‘the political’ as it is conceived of by parliaments and parties.
At the same time, however, the limits of ‘continuity Scotland’ and the technocratic mindset have been thrown into sharp relief over the past two decades. For all the rhetoric saying otherwise this has been the dominant strand of the devolution era – whether under Labour or the SNP. Its limitations have become more and more obvious. An inability to embrace the new or confront big questions, and a desire to accrue and maintain power and authority for its own sake, have not allowed the changes coming from the wider public sphere to reshape the formal political arena in ways that represent a clear break from the institutions and mindsets of top-down control.
The social democratic tradition in Scotland has many achievements to its name, but it has become, over the devolution era, increasingly a defensive outlook, aspiring to defend what we have, particularly from the post-war social compact, redressed in language and values tailored to here. It has not been hugely creative and outward looking, economically, socially and democratically. Yet, we should not be too hard on ourselves, for the last two decades have been a harsh climate for centre-left politics the world over, to which Scotland cannot be completely immune.
Too many conversations about our nation are posed as either/or. Thus, there are endless debates on whether Scotland is a conservative country or a radical nation; whether it is different from the rest of the UK, or not that different; whether it is Scottish nationalist or unionist. These debates miss that it is possible to be two things or even more at once. Scotland clearly is a conservative nation in many respects and has had a long outlook on many public issues – economic, social, ethical and moral – where it has not embraced change easily. But it is also a nation with a radical, dissenting tradition, which at times has asked serious questions of those with power: the 2014 Indyref being only the most recent. Even that most famous of binary debates – the referendum – at its best allowed for a rich interpretation of Scotland’s potential futures; but it was clearly not this for everyone.
The world of binary Scotland is the articulation of the divided Scotland trope, used through the ages to pathologize difference and raise self-doubt and lack of confidence. It has said that Scotland is too divided – between Protestant and Catholic, Highland and Lowland, West and East, SNP and Labour – to be a fully functioning self-governing nation. It has always been a deception and a deflection to say just put up with the way things are and the status quo. Instead, we should not duck these challenges, but embrace them and celebrate the many Scotlands that are within our borders and multiple identities which exist and say loudly that difference and diversity makes us stronger not weaker.
Moreover, to do this we have to take on the parts of our society who want to retreat to their respective bunkers and live in a monocultural nation, emphasising only their identities and traditions, while trying to deny others their place and voice.
This means we have to talk about and confront toxic Scotland. Unreflective tribalism of any expression – left, nationalist, unionist, centre or right – harms and hinders our wider body politic. However, such deformations do not exist in a political vacuum. They occur in an environment where political leadership is wary of taking risks, facing challenges or mapping out new directions. Related to this is the complexity, diversity and ambiguity of living in an age where, on the one hand, social media has coarsened as well as enlivened discourse, and where elements of public life that previously operated through traditional gatekeepers have weakened, along with old hierarchical codes and boundaries.
This leaves Scotland with the momentous task of negotiating a fresh set of ethics and ideals for living together in a way that respects diversity while seeking justice, accountability, participation and a necessary degree of social harmony. That conversation, which also needs to take environmental sustainability as its foundation, feels like it has hardly begun. Indeed, the general noise and vituperation of political life, and the disruption or disaggregation of ideas and institutions that previously glued together the UK, have allowed little adequate space for it to happen.
This touches on another important issue effecting how we are, or can be, ‘together’ as a nation, and as part of a bigger set of relationships within Britain and Europe. Scotland used to be a very violent society. This is a country that systematically belted school children until 1987; and in which Glasgow was until recently the ‘murder capital of Europe’, a record it has now thankfully lost. But we still have too much of a culture of violence, exclusion and blighted lives hanging over large parts of our society, including, damningly, in what can be described as relatively prosperous economic times for the majority of the population.
Creating a different future involves facing our demons as well as celebrating our virtues. In the past, many assumed a common or dominant religious framework for doing that. This no longer persists. Scotland is a mixed belief society. Secularisation has eroded trust and confidence in hierarchies claiming transcendent validation, the narratives they relied upon and the power they wielded to enforce them. This is a good thing overall, we would argue. But it leaves a significant task of re-forging social and cultural bonds, creating cross-communal conversations and reaching collective agreements of the kind that can nourish a genuine sense of commonality as well as diversity. This is, simultaneously, a sociological and spiritual task.
So, what, in practical terms, will help bring the Scotland of the future into being on the basis of the immediate conditions and challenges we have outlined? We suggest below a number of possible initiatives – none of which are unrealisable or utopian, but all of which require courage and investment.
In the politico-social realm there is an urgent need to nurture new centres of policy, ideas and experimentation. One expression of this would be the creation of more think tanks: a flawed model perhaps, but one area in which Scotland suffers by their relative absence. At present there are only two independently constituted think tanks in the conventional sense: Reform Scotland and the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) Scotland. There is also the hybrid Common Weal, which has positioned itself as a pro-independence do-tank and produces many interesting reports. However, it has been plagued by a lack of solid funding (being supported by crowdfunding) and what some see as a lack of proper process in its work: both of which make the case for more substantive initiatives needing to occur.
More than a decade into the SNP as a party of government the absence of an independent minded and supportive (but autonomous and challenging) think tank for the current party of government is a telling omission. The SNP over the entire devolution period has been focused on first, a party strategy, and then winning and utilising the agencies of the state. What it has hitherto shown is a lack of interest or understanding in creating new institutions and autonomous capacity.
A possible model for the SNP to follow is provided by Labour, and the centre-left’s involvement, in the creation of IPPR following a succession of Labour defeats in the 1980s. People sympathetic to Labour, but not bound by them, created this new body with support of the party leadership. But the whole project came not from the party or the leadership, but from those operating in proximity rather than conformity to the party. A similarly scoped initiative in Scotland is sorely needed – and indeed has more propitious terrain to start with, since the SNP have not yet suffered electoral defeat, but is surely facing a stalling of its project without fresh ideas and inspiration. The Growth Commission, technocratic and managerial in style, unimaginative and constrained in output, showed how not to do this (Sustainable Growth Commission, 2018). A different style and approach are required.
In this area, the think tank issue is but one expression of a wider malaise. Indeed, the current form of think tankery and wonkery needs challenging. Scotland (and Britain) needs resourced thought spaces which are not simply tied to parties, corporations or the policy round, but which can re-tell the story of change and focus our imagination, as well as our practical energies, on patterns of living which re-found the political, rather than simply conform to its expectations. The name and form of such bodies are yet to be arrived at and will require bold experimentation to realise them.
Both nationalists and unionists need to recognise that the present nature of constitutional politics and disputation is not sufficient to refit Scotland for the future. Political choices – about who governs, where and how – have to be made, of course. But the tradition of invoking popular sovereignty is needed to prevent these debates from becoming stale, unproductively fractious and logjammed. ‘A Claim of Right’ is a powerful strand in the Scottish political tradition which can help here. There have been three previous claims: 1689, 1843, and 1988 (the latter in relation to the Thatcher Government and the democratic deficit). The Scottish Parliament recently re-invoked the last Claim in a 2012 vote (while Westminster accepted it as recently as 2018).
There is now an obvious relevance to the possibility of a fourth Claim which takes the tradition of popular sovereignty and gives it practical expression. This would sketch the principles of a new constitutionalism and the principles of political power, and further differentiate Scotland from the broken shipwreck of what is accurately called ‘the English constitution’ (a phrase used in the last Claim, referencing Bagehot).
Popular constitutionalism is evident the world over these days. It is the process whereby the making of new constitutions – once the preserve of the great and the good – has more and more become owned and created by the popular will; indeed, in many studies the participative nature of the process is deemed to be as important as any constitution’s actual content. Iceland’s (unfulfilled) experiment is one recent example in northern Europe. Citizens’ Assemblies are a growing phenomenon, and one which Scotland can fruitfully make use of.
That said, the era of Scottish Constitutional Conventions (which while referencing a different political tradition was actually a top down talking shop) is over. The attraction of such a set of arrangements in the era of high Thatcherism made sense, but no longer. We can surely do much better. Moreover, given the need to develop the Scottish Government and Scottish state in participatory ways, now is the time to further initiatives in popular sovereignty with state support and legitimacy. For example, through the creation of a Citizens’ Assembly looking to map out the country’s future constitutionally (and which could draw on the Irish example of such assemblies). This is something that the SNP and the Greens are now arguing for. The question is how and when it will be established. It needs to be set up and mandated by the Government in negotiation with civic organisations. Citizens’ Assemblies (we are not restricted to just one) seeking to bring together a demonstrable cross sections of Scotland as a whole, could assist in breaking out of the logjam on the independence and related questions, which have become fixated on process and timing, and instead get to the substance of what it is we are trying to decide and achieve.
The underlying practical question about future Scotland still remains – how to think about and address the ‘what comes next’. The last decade has seen an absence of national futures projects, and indeed there have not been any substantial public futures initiatives since Scotland 2020 and Glasgow 2020 (in which one of the authors was heavily involved).
Democratising the idea of the future and building ‘future literacy’ involves creating a national set of conversations in which people from all walks of life deliberate and decide on their preferred future Scotland, rather than it be owned and curated in a closed way by experts and institutions – which the two afore-mentioned projects showed the potential of. Framed in this way it can be a powerful mobilising tool.
However, to gain traction it requires resourcing, encouragement and engagement of people and places, in intermediate spaces where they have independence and integrity from the system, and alongside this, an interface with institutions of representation and governance nationally and locally. This latter point is not to control the project or its outcomes, but to offer a genuine line of communication – hopefully two-way – that increases the chance of change being embraced and implemented.
All of the above suggestions could help encourage and grow debate and potential in the country. They are all evolutionary rather than revolutionary, in that they go with the grain of the best of our traditions and instincts, seeking popular involvement rather than top-down manipulation. They would also take time, effort and money. The next Scotland cannot be built on the cheap and inclusive democracy is not a luxury but the condition of a negotiable, liveable future. It is also about challenging the retreat to minimal change Scotland, which can too often dominate the current system, mainstream politics and media framings. Likewise, a connective national conversation about the future, in involving the full diversity of the country (not simply the imaginings of the usual suspects in the Central belt) would by definition move away from the kind of Scottish essentialism which can infect both nationalist and unionist conceptions about how that future can be created, reducing vision to instrumentalism.
The point of a civic-driven process to move the next Scotland forward is not simply that it involves people in the creation of their own future (vital though that is), but that it moves from the abstract to the concrete, from the general to the particular. That involves asking ‘big questions’ that need to be fleshed out with tangible narratives, examples and inspirations. Questions such as:
What kind of Scotland do we want to live in? In what ways will it be different from the here and now – and different beyond the presently framed constitutional question?
What kinds of change and change makers do we need to encourage?
How do we effect a different kind of state – this being an implicit offer in the 2014 independence argument? Such a state doesn’t come about by osmosis; it needs to be willed into being (Barrow and Small, 2016).
All of this requires a political imagination, leadership and the engagement of differing philosophies and worldviews – ones that both emerge from and sustain a rich ecology of public debate and ideas. ‘Ideals for living’ requires emotional intelligence and humility. Critically they require the creation of an evolving political strategy to give them voice and agency, an awareness of timescales (operating in both the short and longer-term at the same time), and connectivity to the lived experience of everyday Scotland. This entails recognising that politics has to be centred on an understanding and celebration of viviculture – the love and nurturing of life and all that sustains it.
A politics of this kind would look very different from one that concentrated on the abstracts of the constitutional question – whether pro- or anti-independence. Nicola Sturgeon, to her credit, attempted this during the 2014 referendum, when she invoked a young child born in Scotland that year, named Kirsty, and imagined her potential life-chances (Sturgeon, 2012). We need more of this humanly (and humanely) scaled political conversation in Scotland. We need to be able to talk of a future that involves uncertainty and risk; that allows for doubt, unevenness, variety and contingency, rather than a false belief that we can control and predict everything. That prospect has to be more attractive and plausible for the next Scotland than more technocracy or ‘better the devil you know’, lowest-common-denominator thinking.
In contrast, the move towards a globally conscious, locally rooted and viviculture focused politics entails the creation of shared spaces and places where people can see themselves both reflected and included; where they can be and see themselves as active agents, and where they feel they can have a genuine say and voice. From this flows a very different manner of public debate and conversation, one which has due care for how we interact and relate to each other, gives importance to real lived experience and human testimony, and understands the importance of empathy and self-reflection. If this sounds too idealistic for some, such qualities are present in today’s Scotland in many places, such as the journalist writings of Dani Garavelli and Peter Ross: the latter’s Daunderlust collection being one of the great reads of the 2014 Indyref year capturing the human stories beyond the politics; or in the sensational success of Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari (Ross, 2014; McGarvey, 2017). None of these perspectives are about abstractions or obtuse social theory but grounded in everyday Scotland and an understanding of the importance of viviculture, and what we need a lot more of.
This necessitates a politics and sensibility which goes beyond the tendency of left vanguardism and believing itself to be an enlightened elect, and the right’s propensity to believe still that ‘there is no alternative’ and no other viable way to run the world. Too many radicals the world over have fallen into the cul-de-sac of miserablism and trying to tell people how wrong we are all living our lives, and that unless we change, we are away to hit economic disaster or environmental apocalypse (Duncombe, 2007). Similarly, in a far-reaching critique of left politics, the US writer Jonathan Matthew Smucker has argued that too often radicalism has too much emphasis on the self-serving practice of moralists and sainthood which leads to a cul-de-sac and avoids the challenge of contributing to an alternative popular morality and ethics (Smucker, 2017).
Finally, because of the age of constant change a sizeable portion of politics across the West is actually about invoking the past. We see this on the reactionary and populist right. But we also see it on the left: in the US opposition to Trump and elements of Black Lives Matter and even #MeToo movements, the Corbynista takeover of Labour on both sides of the argument, and in the Scottish independence debate. The US community organiser Michael Gecan has talked of re-enactment politics, whereby protestors act out past scripts, which once had power and potency, to increasingly diminishing returns (Gecan, 2004). In his argument, people increasingly play to a narrow cast of true believers, have a degree of self-righteousness and lack of awareness of how this comes across to people who don’t share their passions. Gecan thinks much of the US left is prone to such behaviour, as have been parts of pro-independence opinion here post-2014.
Such a penetrating critique would ask demanding questions relevant to today’s Scotland. Who are the main audience or target of any activities? Is it people on your own side, your opponents, media or the undecided? What is your power analysis, both of your own power in its depth, credibility, allies and potential sympathisers, and what is your power analysis of your opponents? Re-enactment politics are too often about insiders who are both actors and audience, essentially talking to themselves and giving themselves standing ovations in public. For all their radical and sometimes even revolutionary rhetoric, there is both a nostalgia for past struggles and even a restoration politics, harking back to previous and supposedly simpler times.
A politics that is not about re-enactment, that is not primarily invested in revisiting past triumphs and defeats, would be one that moved a further step towards making real the Scotland of the future. It also would be concerned with ensuring that it is informed by decent, humane and compassionate values, and that it is also, critically, reachable in the not too distant future.
Changing Scotland requires an understanding of the ecologies, cultures and dynamics of public life, and the creation of William Mackenzie’s ‘community of the communicators’ (see introduction) – one that recognises who has voice and who hasn’t, along with the silences, omissions and gaps (Mackenzie, 1978). The environment for conversation and exchange in the public sphere has changed dramatically in recent decades. The timespan of the last twenty years covered in this book has been influenced by domestic and wider factors – from the decline of traditional media and authority to the rise of social media, all of them seen in the Indyref. This produced a ‘Big Bang’ of energy and engagement, followed by subsequent retrenchment, but in a context where what is ‘normal’ has been substantially altered.
Scotland is still – as charted here – marred by huge inequalities, poverty, powerlessness and a democracy which is simply not pluralist and diverse enough. These characteristics have not been addressed by the climate of the country post-2014, because some siren voices have taken it upon themselves to shout or abuse others in making their case. Some of the most passionate Yes and No supporters on the independence question have reduced politics to a form of trench warfare in which they see their side ‘winning’ through a war of attrition which shows little concern for the wider costs and causalities in public life.
There are shortcomings here on all sides. First, a politics of faith and certainty is ill-fitted to the 21st century world. Second, it creates a mindset of tribalism, ‘othering’ and fixed positions – ergo, all No supporters are unionists, or worse ‘Yoons’, and everyone on the Yes side is a ‘nationalist’ peddling grievance politics. We would instead like to imagine a politics where people are not fixed in each other’s minds as ontological ‘Yes or No voters’, simply as people who voted Yes or No. This is a fundamentally different way of seeing voters and politics.
The ‘true believer’ Indyref mindset tends also to ignore the big questions facing us as a society: climate change; the hollowing out of democracy across the West; the powerful forces aiding inequality. They tend to assume that as long as their political perspective gains control of the organs of governmental power, then everything else will be okay. Even to state such a view is to recognise its conservatism and intellectual paucity.
The future of Scotland and its politics is not the preserve of politics alone. Instead, it is to be found in the fundamentals of how we interact and care for each other, in the relationships which bind us together, how we invest time and attention in one another and how we build trust and connections.
Pivotal in all this is how we speak, listen and engage, noting who is speaking and not speaking, the noise of public life and the silences behind and between those who we are addressing. Scotland has come far in its journey from a society in which the rules were made by tradition, deference and elites, to one where, while all these things still matter, there is a much more open, unpredictable public sphere. This means we have to pay more attention, not less, to how we behave and act in public life.
This is one of the main challenges emerging from our book, something that has to be collectively addressed, and which will have huge consequences for the future Scotland we create and live in. It is a significant positive that in recent years hundreds of thousands of citizens who weren’t previously involved in public life have chosen to become engaged. But at the same time, we have to reflect on how to have conversations that extend beyond those we agree with and our own echo chambers. More than that, we have to nurture and nourish the forces and aiders of social change and address the issues that hold us back. This is vital if we are serious about creating the ‘Scotland the Brave’ that we claim we want to live in. It is indeed time to be bolder and be more courageous. Being respectful and understanding toward others is central to that and to making our collective future a better one.
Barrow, S. and Small, M. (2016), Scotland 2021, Edinburgh: Ekklesia Publishing and Bella Caledonia.
Duncombe, S. (2007), Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy, New York: New Press.
Ellis, S.G. (2003), ‘Why the History of “the Celtic Fringe” Remains Unwritten’, European Review of History, Vol. 10 No. 2.
Gecan, M. (2004), Going Public: An Organiser’s Guide to Citizen Action, New York: Anchor Books.
Mackenzie, W.J.M. (1978), Political Identity, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
McGarvey, D. (2017), Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass, Edinburgh: Luath Press.
Ross, P. (2014), Daunderlust: Dispatches from Unreported Scotland, Dingwall: Sandstone Press.
Smucker, J.M. (2017), Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals, Chico/Edinburgh: AK Books.
Sturgeon, N. (2012), ‘Bringing the powers home to build a better nation’, Strathclyde University, 3 December, available online at: https://www2.gov.scot/News/Speeches/better-nation-031212
Sustainable Growth Commission (2018), ‘Scotland: The New Case for Optimism: A strategy for inter-generational economic renaissance’, Edinburgh: SNP, available online at: https://www.sustainablegrowthcommission.scot/