Thoughtland

Pat Kane's Cal Merc column: English riots, Scottish stupor and the consumptive young

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - I've written this response to the English riots, and have pondered a little at the end about why (so far) there's been no equivalent over the border.

All comments more than welcome.

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It was going to take something extraordinary to pull me back into daily commenting, as I wrestle with a thesis about how environmental politics has to reckon with our human desire for novelty and stimulation. I guess destructive consumer riots in most of the major conurbations south of the border will do it. 

You’ll have probably read enough overview-porn on this, so I’ll confine myself to some blips on my own personal radar. The copy-cat behaviour, spreading beyond London, fascinates me. I wonder what the mix is in each area between the two elements copied - one about young men physically and spatially confronting the authority of police in the streets, the other (involving all sexes) about looting and destroying local and chain-store shops. 

For the first, it surely involves a few strands. There’ll be some legitimate grievance from some ethnic minorities about stop-and-search and racial profiling - the unresolved legacies of decades of structural deprivation, the control levels probably increasing after the domestic terrorism of 7/7. 

But that also cross-fertilises with the desperate solidarities of gang society - sometimes racially, sometimes geographically defined, engaging young men at a psychologically-susceptible moment in their development, and amplified by its own specific pop culture in music and media. Politicians might encourage us to downgrade this, but I don’t want to underestimate the power of the Tottenham police’s killing of Mark Duggan as a cultural meme - easily inflaming other street-battling, gang-oriented youth in different parts of the country. 

The looting and arson is, to me, a lot more complex. I’m partial to the academics pulled together by the Guardian’s Zoe Williams on Tuesday, who noted that the young looters weren’t exactly storming shops for basic staples - the food riots that were the early tremors of the Arab Spring for example - but for goods that confer status in consumer society (phones, tv, clothes). 

The late-night shots of male and female hoodies sashaying down the street with JD Sports and Debenhams bags was like some surreal parody of a Saturday afternoon’s “retail therapy”. Which is, of course, our official compensation for securing and holding down jobs in a service economy. 

Most of the commentary you’ll read will be about how we piece back together a “work ethic” for a now “feral” youth: a generation who, in an age of free downloads and welfare mollycoddling, have lost all sense that consumer gratification should come well after one's respectable efforts in the labour-market. 

Let me just, for a moment, flip it round. These kids aren't rioting for the right to a job in traditional sectors threatened by neo-liberalism (we don't need to bother about that these days, of course, as globalisation has relocated industrial production in the South). 

No, this generation is cursed with semiotic plenitude. They have been super-conditioned by all kinds of powerful media and branding to think they live in a world sprinkled with stardust. A world where self-expression and recognition, not just through the medium of art (X-Factor) but via the basic interactions of their lives (Big Brother), is what essentially matters. 

If you don’t have the talent (and few do, and even those who do soon realise how tough it is to make it), then you have to buy into the lifestyle that at least evokes such stardom. When you realise you are always going to fall far short of the spending power to live that lifestyle, that’s a recipe for permanent, corrosive dissatisfaction. What’s different compared to the seventies is the explosion of media - meaning the explosion of ways to get a tantalising, frustrating taste of the consumer identity you know you’ll never quite possess. 

Our headlines about youth in recent years have been about the calamitous rise in their mental disorders, as much as their delinquency or failures of character. Might not the compelling, multi-sensory surround of lifestyle consumerism be to some degree the cause of those disorders? And might not that psychological fragility contribute to the corroded characters of those English youth, thinking they can turn their high-streets into glass-strewn fields of excess? 

How do these kids get out of this bedazzling trap? My 2004 book The Play Ethic suggested one response to the shower of visions of the good and creative life that a multimedia society generates, without it providing an equal socio-economic opportunity to realise them (certainly not under New Labour's empty management of neo-liberalism, and even less under the Coalition's sado-austerity).

My proposal was that we systemically and infrastructurally expand the zone within which people could express themselves in an unalienated way, through freely-chosen and satisfying arts, crafts, trades and lifestyles. This would be supported by a new social contract, involving shorter working hours and a radical reinvestment in public structures and amenities. 

My new thesis ties that collective, playful zone to the biggest crisis that we all face - the need to move away from hyper-consumerism under the terminal threat of climate change. I’m suggesting that a playful lifestyle will enable us to replace status consumption with joyous co-production, and also lighten our load on the planet.

The classic retort has been that this is an unaffordable, indulgent luxury. I’m a fool to presume that our human nature is naturally social and convivial; and I’m incapable of addressing fundamental questions about prosperity and economy. Alright then: On the brink of a double-dip recession, with the Western world up to its eyeballs in debt of all kinds, and with financial plutocrats dumping the costs of their mendacity on the populace - can anyone out there say that the the traditional production-consumption model has served us all that fabulously well? 

At the moment, given the parade of revolting, hypocritical harrumphing from millionaires and Bullingdon types in the Westminster regime (and a timorous opposition), I have no hope that any of these ideas will even be audible at a UK level. So before I go back to peering at my Kindle, a few words on what is (so far) an interesting anomaly: Why no consumer riots in Scotland? 

Well, we do have rather regular consumer riots, at least in Glasgow. They’re called Old Firm games. These are policed in a generally acceptable way - and enteprisingly, some of those collective resentments are turned into solid retail and merchandising revenues. The only errant elements are: the occasional attempts to bouncy-bouncy Glasgow’s Underground train off its tracks; some outbursts of domestic or street violence in and around fixtures, fatalities only occasional; and more recently, a problem around the psychic compensations of 19th century migrant labour-history for bored-shitless-with-themselves West of Scotland males. (Yes, look up there: the red irony light is ON). 

But I also couldn’t help noticing a classic Scottish social indicator, sneaking into view as London roiled and burned. It seems that we are still the leading European nation for drug deaths; slightly down on last year, but still seven times the continental average. I walked through Sauchiehall Street today - the equivalent of Manchester’s Arndale or Tottenham’s High Street - and felt weirdly safe among my fellow, trundling Glaswegians. The only impedance to one’s complacent, Salmondesque stroll? The regular piles of shrunken, junkie humanity at my feet, nodding off with a plastic cup in their laps, none of whom seemed remotely capable of conducting any kind of consumer riot amidst the retail saturnalia.

Maybe that enduring self-loathing and inferiorism of Scottish life - possibly more virulent in the 50% who didn’t vote in the last Holyrood election, than among those who did - has its pacific benefits, after all. The needle and the damage done keeps the more brittle portions of the Scottish poor quiet and manageable - that is, until Smart, Successful Scotland gets round to them, as something to tick off the progressive checklist. Onwards, and sideways.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: After BBC Scotland's The Scheme, let's bring some real people-power to Scottish broadcasting

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - further meditations on the BBC Scotland documentary series, The Scheme. What if the cameras began to be held by those at the other end? And how do we carve out space from a "Scottish Digital Network" to give voice to those too often spoken on behalf of? All comments welcome. 

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It was when the junkie son, coming up from his kitchen-sink fix, planted a wet, smeary kiss on the camera lens filming him, that I began to relent a little in my rage and disdain for BBC Scotland's controversial series The Scheme.

Purely as a piece of dramaturgy - with his mother shuddering and sobbing in the raggedy garden, his brother scowling on the couch, suddenly realising the nihilism and destructiveness of his brother's addiction - this was as effective a sequence as you'd find in Zola, Orwell or Kelman, sensitively measuring the emotional cost of poverty.

But the lens-kiss was the perfect closing moment. In one blissful act of boundary-less excess, breaking every "documentary" or fly-on-the-wall convention, he reminded us that this is only one narrative construction of poverty in Scotland, among many possible others.

When I launched myself at The Scheme's first outing last year, calling it "poverty porn" (on the basis of two episodes, before a court case stopped us seeing the rest), I found myself at the middle of an interesting storm of communication. Residents and ex-residents of the area mailed me with tales of how many of the more positive stories from the Kilmarnock scheme had been solicited and recorded, but clearly hadn't made it to the final cut.

I found myself on that bare escarpment of serious Scottish public-interest telly, Newsnight Scotland, arguing toe-to-toe with Channel Four's Stuart Cosgrove. Stuart accused me of denying the poor of Onthank the right to knowingly "perform their lives" for reality television, under financial and legal conditions entered into with full awareness and consent. Wasn't I once a similar working-class boy, making a name for myself (and money) out of acting it up on stage?

My answer was that I was trying to perform and display my competence, my skills, my aspirations - and I got nothing but positive reinforcement and self-esteem from that kind of stardom. But to surrender yourself to an editing process that seemed patronising and prurient - at least from the first two episodes, with Marvin (another junkie) tottering around his house with a mop, to the soundtrack of the Sorcerers' Apprentice - so that your incompetence and brokenness was what the world would always remember about you, in the eternal return of YouTube? Surely not comparable, Stuart.

As is the way of these things, we thrashed it out via online forums, and then got back to our busy media agendas. When I saw that the show was back in the schedules - and hey, with its own special week in the Daily Record! - I wanted to ignore it.

But the episode I managed to catch this time round was a signal improvement on the opening. Apart from the tragic scene already mentioned, the Bree family - already on the road to re-opening a local community centre, and having raised £5000 to do so - were impressively barrelling their way through bureaucrats, while also coping with a family bereavement.

And amidst the coming and going of hingy girls, superego-less boys and despairing parents, choosing between greater or lesser intoxications as pregnancies and relationships were continued or terminated, one house-proud couple were at least allowed to show their feature garden - and the pride and craft embodied in it.

Here, the art of the effective documentary maker - hanging around to get that one telling moment, and being sensitive enough to let it make the final cut - was deployed extremely well: capturing the determination and grief of the Brees, the attractive, quiet integrity of Onthank's best gardener.

But still, we're in the land of broadcast tv - where considerable budgets go towards careful selection of real-life "dramatic characters"; where we expect the high audio-visual fidelity that only expensive cameras and sound can deliver; where only the choicest, most illustrative quote or incident from the thousands of hours recorded makes the final cut of a "watchable" television episode.

I'm so tired of, and resistant to, this kind of televisual authority. There was a brilliant series in the very early days of Channel Four in the 80's, called Open The Box, which applied the critical techniques of media studies to the process of television-making. I'll never forget a sequence in which a RP-accented tv producer was filmed recording a documentary piece in the front room of an evidently working-class, and not very articulate, couple.

Open The Box carefully watched the production crew prod them this way and that, urging them to "blend in the question with the answer", moving them like dress mannequins around their own home. The piece ended with the director's aside to those he evidently thought were fellow media professionals - but who had at least the ethical integrity to keep this "illustrative quote" in: "You know what they say... never work with children. Or animals."

Am I accusing The Scheme's makers of a similar kind of media cynicism? Not directly, no. But in the age of what Manuel Castells calls "mass self-communication", I am suggesting that we take an iron railing and tap a few gaping cracks into the enchanted glass of broadcast television in Scotland. A "Scottish Digital Network" (SDN) is actually quite an interesting general concept, if expanded from the "BBC2/BBC4 with McArchive" proposal that's come out of the Scottish Broadcasting Commission.

Instead of presuming that such a channel, wrested from the Union's maw, will be mostly about givng more documentary commissions to doubtless well-meaning but inescapably objectifying media-types, might we also try something a bit different? How about encouraging and training those in communities like Onthank to do their own mediating of their life-conditions - giving them the power of recording, editing and dissemination, letting them evolve their own norms of quality, topic and relevance?

We're happy to benchmark ourselves against small European nations - and we could do worse than to copy Finland's extensive and historic commitment to media-production literacy throughout their population. There is a latent community of artists and activists in Scotland - New Media Scotland and the CCA in Glasgow are the main hubs - who would be only too willing to fan out into Scotland's hard-bitten areas and set up media labs, bringing what the Scottish conceptual artist Simon Yuill calls "distributive practice" to the people. (A great benchmark for this is actually the Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol, well worth the investigation. And our own Lesley Riddoch has been something of a pioneer of community media).

Some of the broadcast hours of an SDN - and not just the dead hours of the early morning either - should be devoted to nurturing, curating and re-presenting the experiences of struggling communities in Scotland, building up their powers of mass self-communication. Will this media be raw, unfinished, static, gauche, partisan, pawky, hedonistic, sentimental, nostalgic, angry, obsessive, trainspottery, specialist? All of the preceding, and better, and worse.

But is this rough emergence worth clearing some space for, at the heart of Scotland's evolving media representation of itself - and at precisely this moment where "self-determination" and "independence" (at all levels, and in all ways) are the buzzwords of the Scottish Spring? I would argue, yes. Let there be a "democratic interact" - or as Salmond once put it in a speech in 2007, an "architecture of participation" that reaches to every corner of the country.

So, less desperate kisses on the lens of a Corporation camera - and more eager hands fingering the "record" (and "upload") button of a democratic media in Scotland. 

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Independistas need to listen to the silent half of Scottish society

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - the second part of my consideration of the SNP's victory in the last Holyrood election. This one looks at the below 50% turnout on May 5 - and asks how independence politics can reach out to those, particularly at the poorer end of society, and connect full sovereignty to better life-prospects. All comments welcome.

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The big speeches have been delivered, the seats are being generously warmed, the gears of Scottish government crank back into action. The second SNP administration, having democratically secured a working majority in political system designed for rule-by-coalition or minority government, finds itself in a unique position.

In the campaign for office, many winning political parties find themselves almost instantly lacking in credibility. Manifesto promises that claim to be tightly connected to governmental levers can loosen and unravel, as the black (and evenly mildly grey) swans of economic turbulence swim into view. 

Yet the SNP government has a unprecedented political mandate to seek extra levers of economic and resource power in Scotland - and it seems that the British state is rattled enough to concede at least some of those. So the SNP resoundingly win the electoral game of policy ambition in Scotland - and then get the chance to change the rules of the game, so they can increase economic revenue and reliably answer those ambitions.

Short of their magical majority, trapped in a minimally reformed devolution, how quickly would they have run into a hailstorm of broken promises and manifesto retrenchment? Salmond is a noted gambler, but this is brand new territory: on May 5th he didn't just win the bet, he got the option to change the lease on the betting shop at the same time. As a spectacle of political achievement in a media-and-marketing age, as I wrote here last week, the SNP victory will be a sophisticated case-study for ambitious parties throughout the world. 

But as I also mentioned last week, it was too much of a spectacle also - a political majority resting on around a quarter of the total possible electorate, in a plebiscite where just under half of those able to vote (49.8%) could be bothered to do so.

In the mid-90s, under James Boyle's dynamic era at BBC Radio Scotland (ochone, ochone), I was sent to Harvard to interview the great Scots-Canadian economist John Kenneth Galbraith, about his 1992 book The Culture of Contentment. His rumbling anxiety was that levels of political participation in US politics were worryingly correlated with class benefit. Those who did vote were responding to appeals to their evident economic self-interest - low taxes, strong on law and order, protectionism for US industry.

Those who didn't were either literally disenfranchised (due to the US's appalling rules on criminality and voter registration, which Obama's 2008 campaign determinedly overcame). Or if they were franchised, people were disgusted with the whole institution of politics, their civic will corroded by the general downpour of stories about political corruption and scandal - and so chose not to exercise their democratic right.

I hope that people vastly better equipped in political science than me (and less in a freelance hurry) are planning to examine the mind-set and attitudes of this 50% of non-participants in the Scottish Spring. What is the balance between Scots unregistered to vote, and Scots registered but choosing not to? I'm guessing we don't have US-style barriers to registration in Scotland, but I'd still like to know the rates.

And as for the rest of this slight-but-silent majority, which of them gaze upon the operations of the Scottish Parliament (hardly free from scandal politics over the years) with the same general jaundice and cynicism as, say, the residents of Detroit or Cleveland?

I've only one family anecdote to bring to this doubtless empirical question: the despair of a relative who was delivering (and urging the completion of) census forms around his Lanarkshire neighbourhood. "So many of them were angry at you, chasing you from the door. Or they were just so totally out of it with drugs or depression that they simply couldn't get it together to fill it in. I had no idea so many people in this area were so basically incapable of functioning." 

In my dispute with Jim Sillars in the Scotsman last week about his concept of "independence-lite" - where we decide, in advance of any constitutional vote on independence, to agree certain shared powers with the UK government - I objected to his notion that "social security" would be one of those "cross-border" functions we'd be happy to cede.

Are we really so happy to fall in with two decades of neo-liberal or Third Way workfare policies? Do we want to continue to compel the armies of surplus labour in Scottish society to take low-paid service jobs in a retail-led, hyper-consumerised economy - hundreds of thousands of Scots acutely aware of their low social status, in an already very unequal society? As we now know from studies like The Spirit Level, self-perception of lowly social status literally degrades the minds, bodies and health of the poor. 

Might it also unravel their willingness to be involved in a once-every-five-years plebiscite, of any kind?

Any forward movement in Scottish society has to deal with poverty, its distortions of the human spirit. And that's why the Galbraith thesis doesn't quite work for the 50% who did vote - and, to be honest, the vast majority of those who generally voted (between SNP, Labour, Lib Dems and Greens) for a broadly left-of-centre, Nordic-model platform of manifestos. Cross-party commitments to free education, free health and renewable energy are light years away from Galbraith's US affluent middle-classes actively using their vote to preserve their privatised privileges in each of those areas. 

As I wrote last week, the SNP won their majority of votes by layering a psychologically-literate politics of hope and aspiration, in an authentically Scottish register, on top of this broad social-democratic consensus. But as Kenneth Roy's necessary article reminded us a few days after the election, the mandate is based overall on some gey few turn-outs. Glasgow shows alarming figures of participation, almost exactly correlated to poorer areas - only 43% for Nicola Sturgeon in Southside, 38% in the SNP gain of Shettleston, 35% in Provan, Even Salmond's own seat had 48% staying at home.

When Obama unlocked Galbraith's iron-cage of contentment, he did so in a way that clearly gave a campaign template to the SNP - a hopeful and socially-repairing message of national renewal. But he also constructed a huge program of voter registration, and then motivated those voters - meaning significant rises in black/minority, youth and working-class participation in the overall plebiscite, most of these rises going to Obama.

And in a nation often described as a deeply malfunctioning democracy (a "moronic inferno", in Martin Amis's famous words), note that voter turnout was over ten percent higher than ours - 61.7% in the 2008 US election. The only Scottish constituency that cleared 60% participation in May was the Tory-turned-Labour Eastwood - replete, let us say, with enough socio-economic ease that voters might enthusiastically consider their political options.

What does the electoral underbelly of the SNP victory mean for an independence referendum? Duncan Hamilton at the weekend restated the gradualist position for Nationalists: this was a vote for "more good government", with the extension of demands for more powers for devolution continuing that display of forward-looking competence. And a referendum on independence will be won, he suggested, "if the proposals emphasise a sense of national unity and consensus."

How much of the nation will be involved, though? And is that a consensus only among the "unco guid" of can-be-bothered, civically-conscious voters?

The post-Scottish-election debates about the exact definition of independence have been generated by many factors. But for me, it's all been about the need to ensure that a Scottish Parliament has as many effective governmental powers as possible, in order to reduce the shaming inequality of life-chances in Scottish society. 

Yes, full fiscal autonomy will support a jobs-creating business environment in Scotland - and as we hope, jobs as part of a green industrial and infrastructural renaissance. My greatest hope is that there will be a renewed demand for the craft and technical skills that constituted the identity of the Scottish working class thirty years ago - but under brand new sustainable values of efficiency, ingenuity and useabilty, where workers have a much less alienated, much more intrinsic investment in the work they do. Not so much a work ethic, but a social-productive ethic - the construction needed for a better-founded society.

We need the entrepreneurs and business-growers who are riding this wave to also think about the quality of employment they're providing for the Scottish people - and where that employment can do most good. Local and national government, in its role as procurer and regulator of services, has much power here to shape green development - and make sure that it brings agency, dignity and resources to all those currently disconnected from the Scottish future.

So would a clear plausible link between the powers of independence, and a new vision of the labouring and productive life in Scotland, reach out to those un-citizens who stayed out of the polling both on May 5th? That link, yes, and perhaps many others in addition to our existing social-democratic menu - around housing, the quality of public space, local provisioning of food, greater voice and input into our mediaspace (ie, don't just sneeringly point cameras at the "cast-list" of The Scheme, but give them the cameras, and the skills, to render their own lives as an empowering narrative).

And for me, one reason to ensure a "full-independence" that has control over armed forces is to begin the demilitarisation of Scottish public life. We must reduce the position of the army as sometimes the only substantial career option available to young men and women in poorer communities, historically and currently. Not forgetting the foul waste of expertise and resources expended on Britain's military-industrial complex. Out of all the songs that we might sing to celebrate a free and fully sovereign Scotland, let's not forget Hamish Henderson's Freedom-Come-'a-Ye.

To make the most of an independence referendum, we need to start to build an independence society - what Gerry Hassan calls "self-determination at every level". Further notes on that anon. But half a country not bothering to decide its own future, even on a classically rainy day, is a warning bell that we must not ignore. 

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: The Juggernaut of Joy - a cognitive theory of how the SNP won

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - the first part of a two-part head-scratching about how the SNP won so big in last week's election, by means of some of the latest thinking from cognitive science (as summarised by Manuel Castells in Communication Power). The second part will look at how the same communicational strategies would work in an independence referendum. All comments welcomed.

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“Positive campaigns will always beat a negative campaign and I hope that’s a lesson Scottish politics will long remember” – Alex Salmond, the Herald, 6 May 2011.

Given the way the SNP’s electoral machine ripped up the proportional checks and balances of a Unionist-devised parliament, turned Labour urban heartlands into SNP urban heartlands, and siphoned votes from both Liberal Democrats and the Greens, I doubt they’ll ever forget.

Independistas are still doubtless rubbing their eyes at the sheer fact of a majority party in Holyrood whose stated aim is the establishment of a Scottish nation-state. I think there’ll be more than a little strategic staggering around for a few weeks yet, as new MSPs and newly empowered SNP party grandees wonder exactly how to translate their manifesto commitments into a policy programme for the next five years.

But I’ve deliberately opened with Salmond’s well-polished quote because I want to dwell on the means and methods of this seismic event in Scottish history. If we don’t really understand what led up to 5 May 2011 – and particularly the seemingly miraculous six-week turnaround from defeat to victory – I don’t think we’ll have the proper foundations for any conceivably successful campaign in the independence referendum. (I’ll come to my ambivalence about how many options there should be on the ticket in a later column.)

This is a properly modest contribution, given the manifest brilliance of the SNP’s campaign team – who are doubtless already scheming away. But Salmond’s admonition at the beginning gave me an intellectual itch. Was that the case? Do positive campaigns always defeat negative ones?

Cognitive science says “Mostly, yes”. I’ve been ploughing through the Catalan sociologist Manuel Castells’ 2009 book Communication Power, which provides an incredible overview of the science of politics in a media age. Much of it comes from US studies into how emotion (values and habits) is essentially at the seat of voters’ political decisions, rather than just rational calculation of self-interest.

This is the lesson that US Republicans learned over many years, using the best psychological expertise of Madison Avenue to select images and phrases that triggered primary emotions. And it’s a lesson that (excepting Clinton and Obama) the Democrats generally forget, preferring to aim detailed and statistical policies at the rational minds of voters.

The basic psychological–neurological mechanisms that underpin what Castells calls “emotional politics” almost instantly begin to shed light on the SNP’s transformative victory. To begin with, it’s all about the mirror-neurons: the fact that when we see an action performed in the world, the same part of our brain fires up as if we were performing that action ourselves. As George Lakoff says, “the use of the same neural structure for experience, and representation of experience, has enormous political consequences”.

Parties or politicians should now be aware that everything they do and say, and the forms in which they do so, is shaping voters in much deeper ways that they’d previously thought.

Crucially, the brain builds frames – made from culture and language, but resulting in new, physical patterns of neurons – to make use of these primary responses to others. The political prize for creating the most compelling emotional frame – whether you’re making TV shows, advertising or a political campaign – is huge. Castells’ research says that it’s this emotionally-rooted frame which actually shapes what facts and information you find relevant in any argument. Establish your frame in people’s minds, and they’ll literally see reality – including the details and priorities of policy – your way.

Clearly this is what the SNP’s campaign – reportedly begun in August 2010 – fully achieved. But how, exactly? Castells identifies two deep emotional responses that are particularly relevant to politics: enthusiasm and fear.

Fear triggers anxiety, uncertainty and an increase in political calculation in the voter, who widens their search for more information about the other parties, carefully evaluating options. But if you can incite enthusiasm, the voter narrows down their search for other options, and exhibits “goal seeking behaviour” towards those enthusiastic parties and politicians. Political enthusiasm “creates positive emotions by directing an individual towards experiences and situations that produce pleasure and reward”.

All parties in this election fully bombarded the voters with anxiety-generating statistics and policy options – aimed at the “rationally calculating” citizen. But the SNP almost certainly had the campaign with the most enthusiastic, culturally uplifting overtones. There were bright, collective slogans: “Be Part of Better”, “Let’s Work Together” (tied to an evocative rock song) and “Together We Can Make Scotland Better”. There were Hollywood-style campaign launches, and steady streams of substantial celebrity and leading-figure endorsements (guilty as charged).

Yes, at the heart of this was a defensible policy record, and a credible policy manifesto, weapons available to use at the traditional rationalist hustings moment if necessary. But the SNP’s overall cloud of positivity managed to cast every other party in the role of complainers and carpers on the sidelines. Castells quotes research on ads in American political campaigns that say if you engage voters with an enthusiastic appeal, their prior political choices firm up: that is, the symbolic “frame” of the campaign reinforces the neural “frame” (or predisposition) in the citizen’s mind.

As the SNP was already the incumbent party, with a clear electoral base surrounded by floating voters, the positive campaign probably encouraged half-hearted SNP supporters to vote full-heartedly. And it possibly encouraged full-hearted ones to respond to the “both votes SNP” appeal of the final week – thus breaking the anti-majority structural bias of the Holyrood parliament. Scottish Labour ran a campaign almost entirely aimed at the “fear” frame of the emotional citizen.

According to Castells’ studies of American politics, it was almost textbook Republican stuff. One of the most powerful and deep emotional triggers (or “somatic markers”) that politicians can reach for is fear of death. Communication Power shows how Republicans successfully used the “existential threat to the nation” after 9/11 to build public support for military actions, the factual justification for which was either ill-founded or fallacious. In the grip of a successful “death-fear” framing, rational or empirical counter-argument mattered little to American opinion. 

The interesting subtlety that Castells notices is between anxiety and anger. A fear-based rhetoric that clearly identifies a wrong-do-er, and rouses anger against them - Bin Laden or Saddam - has the same cognitive effect as an enthusiastic appeal: it focusses rather than diffuses citizens minds, leading to "an imprudent processing of events", a desire for justice that narrows down the search for other options. 

What was Labour’s knife-crime policy other than a direct (and tawdry) appeal to “fear of death”? Now, according to the cognitive science, what fear and anxiety does is to impel voters to begin to seek out more information and to “carefully evaluate” other options. Yet this also tends to diffuse voting intention, rather than firm it up – and in any case, the SNP were ready with a “positive” response of “1,000 more police on the beat”.

Rather scarily, what we should be thankful for is that the Labour Party didn't identify a folk-devil to turn general anxiety about knife-crime into focussed anger - for example, party-political broadcasts of marauding neds across bucolic housing schemes. (If John McTernan, one of their chief advisers, had got his way, the images would have been much worse). 

The second fear strategy deployed by Labour in the last week was “fear of deprivation” – the consequence of an SNP vote leading to independence, and all the societal “chaos” that implied. Yet again, the SNP used its incumbency to remind voters of the continuity and stability of the last four years of Scottish government.

Castells often talks about the natural and instinctive politician being able to emotionally resonate, using cultural metaphors and symbols, with his or her constituency. Salmond’s summation of the popular judgement on the SNP’s first term in government – “Aye, they’ve done no’ bad, they deserve another kick o’ the ball” – is an effortless example.

Castells also talks about hope as a powerful emotional underpinning of politics. “Hope is a fundamental ingredient in activating brain maps that motivate political behaviour oriented towards achieving wellbeing in the future, as a consequence of action in the present,” he writes. “Hope is a key component of political mobilisation… Fear is essential for self-preservation. But hope is essential for survival because it allows individuals to plan the outcome of their decisions, and it motivates them to move toward a course of action from which they expect to benefit.”

Of course, “hope” (not to mention “change you can believe in”) was the 2008 Obama campaign’s great slogan (Castells provides a magisterial analysis of that in Communication Power). But “change you can believe in” was almost the invisible subtitle running under every part of the SNP’s campaign. If hope is “essential because it allows individuals to plan the outcome of their decisions” and “motivates them to move towards a course of action from which they expect to benefit”, then the SNP’s “Scottish Hope” tied those practical aspirations to the functioning of a Scottish parliament.

Scottish Labour’s other peddled scare – “fear of Tory Westminster” (chimed by all the other non-Tory Unionist parties) – might have had the desired effect of getting undecided voters to seek information about those generating the fear. Castells says that anxiety also weakens the general intention to even participate in a voting process. 

And those who did eventually turn to examine the SNP as the “scary” party would have found a “hopeful” narrative and framing about their life in Scotland – a narrative that had at least the possibility of answering their citizen’s desires to take more control of, and get more benefit from, their lives. 

Again, Scottish Labour didn't manage to transform anxiety about independence, or rule from Tory Westminster, into anger. It would seem that over a decade of the Scottish Parliament has gradually answered the desires of Scottish citizens for more power in their own lives - desires thwarted, and therefore transformable into much angry protest, in my heyday political era of the 80's and 90's. 

Might this analysis also account for the failure of the Greens (which I regretted – I was looking forward to a much stronger voice for sustainability in the parliament)? They sallied forth on their own “fear-oriented” politics – the keynote being “we’ll raise taxes to defend you against Tory-imposed cuts”, within a general horizon of looming environmental collapse.

Greens have a joyful, convivial, optimistic political message buried away in their thinking and practice – I’ve written about this in the Scottish context before (here and here) – but in the face of the SNP’s Juggernaut of Joy, none of the attractive aspects of sustainable lifestyle change could remotely come through. Change You Couldn’t Believe In, one might say.

I’ll come to the SNP’s particular use of media, new and old, in the next column – and how that can be tweaked and refined for an independence campaign. But Castells’ summary of information-age politics is worth chewing over: “Creating new content and new forms, in the networks that connect minds and their communicative environment, is tantamount to rewiring our minds.”

So the SNP rewired our minds: you heard it here first. Or at least, that is, the minds of the less than one million who gave their vote to the party, on a turnout of just under 50 per cent. About which democratic insufficiency, and its remedy, tune in next week.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: As Election Day approaches in Scotland, we need more civility and conviviality in our public life

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - closing reflections on writing columns before election days, the commonalities of the Scottish political classes, some regrettable structures of feeling in our national lives, & hoping that the politics of hope will triumph on May 5th. All comments welcome. 

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I must have written four or five pre-election columns in my quarter-century of journalism - and they're always a hostage to fortune.

I remember writing something before an election in which "Scotland free by 93" was offered to the people (which the people then primly rejected). If anyone would like to mortify me with memories of said column, which inflicted upon its readers a sci-fi projection of Scotland in 2033... Well, let's hope the digital archives don't go back that far.

But here we are in 2011, with one vaguely futuristic Parliament building under our belts; an anti-dystopian rallying cry for renewable energy to save Scotland from the worst of the anthropocene; and a column being mostly thumbed out on a device which bears close resemblance to the tricorder of my beloved childhood Star Trek.

I promise to reflect in another 25 years time, if I last that long, on my immediate conditions on the eve of a national election. (By that time, I might be literally plugged into something... hopefully something cool and cyborg-y. Rather than merely respiratory)

Will Scotland be independent by that point? As is often quoted, there's a steadily increasing, not decreasing, number of nation-states in the world. Like my old Scottish left mentors Neal Ascherson and Tom Nairn would say, it may well be a world of increasing integration and interdependence - where networked capitalism, and a borderless environmental crisis, both demand as much coordinated global action between democracies as possible.

But for a stateless nation like Scotland (similar to other sub-nations or regions in, say, post-communist Europe), there's no point in not going for the minimum effective regime of geopolitical agency - meaning the nation-state. You should at least give yourself full sovereignty before you begin to parcel it out to wider frameworks, whether they be Westminster, Nordic, European, corporate, global.

Unless some new version of the Treaty of Westphalia comes along, the nation-state is still the crucial means whereby ordinary citizens can find some democratic purchase, as Nairn might put it, on the juggernaut of modernity - even if it's only a light touch on the wheel and the brakes, along with many other small hands and feet.

Which brings us back to tomorrow: Scottish election day, May 5th 2011. Having watched far too much political transmedia over the last few weeks, I've been struck by the patterns of convergence that knit together all the Scottish political classes.

There would seem to be some basic Lego-bricks of Scottish society that all agree on. One is that small businesses, whether family-owned community concerns or thrusting young tech start-ups, are the seedbeds of the modern Scottish economy - an "enterprise" culture, whether social or commercial, that's become a healthy, secular norm of an active, creative Scotland.

Another is that the NHS is totemic, its resources ring-fenced like a sacred cow. I wonder whether this is both an indication of the settled social-democratic will of Caledonia, and an understandable clinging to a service which has to work hard to mitigate far too many wilfully self-destructive physical lifestyles. We may need to further customise the happiness/wellbeing agenda currently gripping the developed world, for a country whose epidemiology is almost the very definition of thrawnness.

And one more component: that orderly streets, visibly and strictly policed, is the prime requirement of public space in Scotland. Funding is easily procured for more bobbies on the beat, armed with customised laws. Meanwhile, our collective outdoor expressions of joy are regarded as potential boondoggles in the making (the Homecoming), or cynical machines for printing sporting money (Ryder Cup, Commonwealth games), or scenes for young male pathology (the Old Firm clashes, Kelvingrove park on the day of the Royal Wedding).

Something in me always curls up and dies when any of the parties go heavy on the law and order agenda - as if there's an element in the Scottish psyche which always remains a Jekyll, fearing its inner Hyde. This interleaves all too neatly with the supposed "excellence" of our crime-fiction industry - a bunch of narrative carrion-crows on Scotland's deprived and distorted urban/suburban realms. There are too many streets and localities in this land where longterm structural deprivation meets what Neal Ascherson once described to me as a punitive "lovelessness" in Scottish daily life: a seeping suffusion of anger and ill-will, ensnaring both accused and accuser.

Tomorrow, whatever arrangement of parties takes the helm of the super-powered milk-van that is devolved Scotland, it would be good if this great concertation of policy could be bent towards the gentling and beatifying of Scottish civic life; the increase of understanding and civility across all political and cultural divisions. We have ever tougher times ahead: and as well as the national powers to cope with them, we need more grace and dignity in this country's daily dealings, to lubricate the fine gears of cooperation. 

So many times in these weeks, as the party-political biliousness inflates to maximum size, I remember Brecht's caution to all radicals and activists in his great poem, 'To Those Born Later':

Hatred, even of meanness,
Contorts the features.
Anger, even against injustice
Makes the voice hoarse. Oh, we
Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness
Could not ourselves be friendly.

Having said that, I enjoyed the SNP's generally positive campaign. If you know anything of the culture around their election machine, you'll know that there are cadres of extremely capable and idealistic young Scots involved. They're very much of the Net Generation, some of them returnees from plum jobs overseas. And they are desperate to apply their expertise and passion to the benefit of this country. You meet them, and it's what you've always hoped for, as a supporter of Scottish independence: that the brightest and best would apply themselves to progressing their country. I hope they get their result.

And as those who read these columns might have gathered, I also like the Scottish Greens. In terms of both the cautionary case of a worsening climate, and the positive case for a new, low-carbon economy and lifestyle, the popular consciousness is ready, and their time has come. I only hope - as I've been trying to suggest in the heady uplands of Scottish think-blogs - that if the "independence majority" of SNP/Green seats appears, both sides can graciously (that word again) see the opportunity for a real moment of transformation in Scottish society, requiring proper negotiation on both sides.

As for the Lib-Dems, Scottish Conservatives and Scottish Labour...Well, I hope that even they might eventually see that a Scotland whose macro-powers are pulled ever higher up the ratchet will give them an opportunity to let their ideologies and traditions flourish. 

Vote early, fellow Scots. And vote hopefully.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: walking through Glasvegas, from consumerism to sustainability

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - sparked by some recent long walks down the consumerist thoroughfares of Glasgow, with an ecological mindset in my head. How can this passionate embrace of stuff, fashion and the casual purchase be shifted towards a low-carbon sustainable Scotland? All comments welcome. 

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As the trendy band comes out with its new, difficult third album, the urban reality of Glasvegas – as you encounter it, while being an everyday, middle-aged pedestrian – is sometimes quite the overwhelming spectacle.

Best place to begin is Charing Cross, advancing east down Sauchiehall Street: a bacchanal of casinos, a scatter of Asian takeaways, every size and shape and theme of bar and club and venue, populated by a nervy mix of students and office workers.

You make a brief, non-commodified genuflection to the CCA(Centre for Contemporary Arts) and the GFT (Glasgow Film Theatre), then it’s down the hill to the glassier and glossier halls of Buchanan Galleries – like a claustrophobic theme-park ride of the world’s biggest brands. And then, if you have the energy, Princes Square and the Merchant City: where the city’s plutocracy (or otherwise credit-worthy) cavort and preen, availing themselves of outer- and underwear shops of Oscar-ceremony standard, with the elephantine Corinthian Club their most available catwalk.

Deep in the labyrinths of eco-thinking at the moment, I’ve been making these regular journeys with my Martian head on. What is all this? Why is it all remotely necessary? You have to push a little further towards the Trongate before things get any less mercantile and fashion-obsessed. Then it’s all struggling galleries, strange comix shops, and the indie-schmindie oasis of the Mono bar and the vintage clothes shop Mr Ben.

They’re still selling, sure, but at least they’re tapping into waves of history, or corners of quirkiness or obsession – none of the lock-step cuts or patterns that sometimes make Glasgow crowds seem like an army of marketing-programmed clones. And then, if you really keep going, Glasgow Green opens up for you: swathes of green grass, park benches not trying to sell you a damn thing, holding back the towers of the Tennent’s brewery (though not its stench) at the other side.

I sat there the other day, looking back on this brawling, greedy, hyper-retailed city centre, and allowed the most regular thought in my head these days to slowly emerge. How do we ever get from this huge collective investment in conspicuous consumption, to anything remotely resembling a materially sustainable society?

In Glasgow at least, shopping is clearly the main ritual (apart from the fitba’) of inclusion, status and belonging for so many – from the determined families with their fistfuls of Primark and sports-shop bags, to the leggy apparitions slipping into people-carriers with wispy, expensive things dangling from their fingers.

The writer and film-maker Ewan Morrison has been charting this territory with his Tales From The Mall, well worth a visit. But his hipster’s disdain, though eloquent and witty, isn’t enough of a response to the sheer momentum of Glasgow’s (or anywhere else’s) consumer frenzy.

The brilliant Tim Jackson, recently deposed head of the Sustainable Development Commission, has a concise one-liner about the unacknowledged dissatisfactions of consumer living. “We spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to make impressions that don’t last, on people we don’t care about.”

Jackson’s explanation for this grammar of frustrated unhappiness is that human nature is strung across two axes: one goes from novelty-seeking to love of tradition; the other goes from selfish behaviour to altruistic behaviour (and Jackson amasses much evidence to show how credible the whole picture is).

The problem is that our institutions are encouraging us to operate on only half of this picture, the selfish, novelty-seeking quadrants – those institutions being consumer-driven capitalism, aided and abetted by massively sophisticated advertising and unfettered financial flows perpetually looking for a return. We can change these institutions to cover the whole spectrum, says Jackson. We have to, given how much heedless consumption is contributing to trends in global warming and other environmental indicators.

The most interesting part of his argument, from a Scottish political perspective, are the nature of the institutions he proposes as part of the solution. For Jackson, it lies in the provision of strong public services and goods – in particular, well-constructed spaces and environments in which people can come together to enjoy each others company, exchange small trades and enthusiasms, express care and attention to others without pressure of time or money.

For the sake of living lightly enough on the planet – at least to be able to survive its Gaian revenge strategies – we must re-engineer a style of existence that places as much value on tradition and altruism as it does on novelty and me-first-ism.

Now surely Glasgow, from memories of Jimmy Reid to the furthest-flung credit union in Easterhouse, has more than enough of the first two to go around. Gerry Hassan’s much-underrated project of social dreaming, Glasgow 2020, attempted to give voice to a future of Glasgow that was rich with dreams of self-empowerment and collective improvement, vaulting beyond the lights of the latest city-centre mall.

And beyond Glasgow, Scotland surely has a deep attitudinal well to draw on for a new public realm. I attended the tenth anniversary meeting of the International Futures Forum last weekend. The IFF is a curious but powerful mix: a selection of major international policy and business gurus, who come regularly to benchmark their grand theories against places such as Falkirk and Dundee, and the schools, prisons, council offices and arts centres therein.

What they register in places like Falkirk is a desire for social innovation that doesn’t get caught up in false ideological battlegrounds, like Westminster’s current “big-state Good Society versus small-state Big Society”. From San Francisco to Mumbai, these experts marvel at the ability of Scots to start conversations about public improvements that gather up individuals and local groups, businessmen and councillors, to achieve solid and persistent results.

Shouldn’t councils such as Glasgow begin to recognise the contradiction between their espoused socialist history, and the consciousness-fragmenting consumerism that overpowers what should be a great convivial space for its citizens? Can they shift the needle of civic priorities in the city centre away from the chip-and-pin device?

And in defiance of Andrew Neil and his abuse of “Scotland’s cloud-cuckoo land”, and with the beginnings of a low-carbon reset for Scottish society in place, can’t we begin to recognise who we actually are, and what we actually want in Scotland?

It means not being cynical about the tears shed by a first minister when recalling how his father used to toil into the night, preparing insurance claims for miners with injuries or poor health. Is our much derided centre-left policy consensus between the parties a sign of complacency and mediocrity – or it is actually an authentic, robust platform from which even more ambitious policies for a flourishing future might rise?

As ever, from me, independence is the indispensable operating system that will get us there. Still, as Jim Sillars said, we need to take sides in Scotland, as well as take Scotland’s side. Glasvegas – or at least that tinseltown-in-the-rainversion of Scotland’s most energetic city – is mostly on the wrong side of the Scottish future. But it needn’t be so.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Scottish humour goes digital (and goes deeper)

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury. In a seeming departure from the usual heavy topics, I'm looking at two examples of new Scottish comedy that are completely connected to the digital age - one lighter, one a lot darker, but both confirming Scottish identity and puncturing it at the same time. All comments welcome. 

* * *

As the Scottish election staggers to a slow run, as Japanese reactors shudder and Libyan despots fume, indeed as the whole crazy modern world beats incessantly on our foreheads, I will admit to one escapist pleasure that literally helps me through the lows of a day: really daft, unrepentantly quirky comedy. 

There are two Scottish practitioners, both embracing the web as props to their humour, that are particularly joy-inducing at the moment. Limmy you may know from his BBC Scotland comedy shows - and for me, he's also one of the most interesting creative figures in the country at the moment. But for now, let me introduce you to the bathetic genius of Swatrick Payze, otherwise known as SwatPaz.

I first came upon SwatPaz's flash-based web animations on the diaspora site Dear Scotland, where he'd animated a Christmas message for them: a Santa (sounding exactly like Edwyn Collins) who got so distracted by his "intirnet-laptoap", searching for Franz Ferdinand concerts, that half the weans missed out on pressies.

From that gentle start, what opens up is a day-glo projection from the Clyde Valley bourgeois unconscious - a pebble-dashed commuter-land where double acts called "Bearsden and Mull-guy" explore the same domestic weirdness and latent violence that the great Jon Kricafalusi explored in his Ren and Stimpy cartoons. Except they sound like censorious frumps and pedants overheard on a northbound train out of Glasgow Queen Street. 

Great classic cartoon comedy - as exemplified by Chuck Jones or Tex Avery - is all about the timing. Specifically, the ability to pause momentarily in the midst of kinetic madness, or to repetitively focus or zoom in on an action or phrase, until it yields a laugh of recognition: Yes, I've dreamt of being that klutzy.

As far as I can see, SwatPaz has that timing to perfection. See "Living Room Telly", or his epic of suburban pettifoggery "Terry Runders Kicks A Stone" - though the red sweaty outraged man in his recent promotional video for the Glasgow Short Film Festival comes close. Scottish humour, like all ethno-linguistic humour, has always done a double service: it chops down the pretentious and the delusional - but it also confirms the specific language and rituals of the community. We are thrilled both by the delicious, dethroning savagery of the joke, and the way it honours our most everyday expressions.

The continuity between Stanley Baxter's Parliamo Glasgow from the 60s (recently a promotional giveaway for a Scottish Sunday newspaper), and the idle animations of a jobbing digital designer from Scottish commuterland, to me is obvious and comforting. We Scots find out who we are - at least in our most stumbling and incomplete modes - through our humour. (It's why I'm addicted to a US website called Old Jews Telling Jokes: I don't get half of the cultural references, but I love the way that you can plug in your own ethnic self-derision at the relevant place, so robust and universal is the structure of each gag).

Who are we as refracted through Limmy's world, though? Brian Limond's second sketch series for BBC Scotland, produced via the incredibly consistent Comedy Unit, has just finished its run. It's strange to say that a show played for laughs can be genuinely haunting and mysterious, but that's what Limmy achieves.

He wanders through the most anodyne parts of Glasgow - the same high-rise courts and wastegrounds that Peter Mullan sent his Neds recently - like a recording angel in smart-casual dress, observing (and sometimes portraying) junkies, jumped-up office pedants, essentially lost and rudderless men (and sometimes women) of all kinds.

Limmy is a guy wandering around a new-build estate, shirtless, repeating himself: "she's turned the weans against me..." Next, Limmy is the happy guy who sells the neon "Open All Hours" signs to all cornershops in Glasgow - though when he closes each deal, a molotov cocktail is the calling card. Honest to the sociological reality of his city, Limmy plays two drug addicts - one woman, Jacqueline McCafferty, whose "recovery" has completely fried any remaining empathy or social graces; and a man, Dee Dee, who is the perfect nightmare of workfare politicians everywhere, a half-awake sloth living and fantasizing in his own domestic debris. 

This is comedy as radar for sociopathy. What policy-makers and academics attempt to substantiate with acres of statistics and studies, Limmy picks up by simply not internally censoring what he sees and hears on the streets of polarised, many-worlds Scotland.

There are smart, efficient Python-esque skits on subversive policemen, fraudlent psychics, incompetent spies. But sometimes, Limmy goes cosmic. There's a brilliant sketch in episode four where Limmy buys a picture frame that happens to open out into a parallel universe: in the face of this wonder, all his equally-cosmically dull dad can talk about are the details of an auntie's minor ailments. There's Bill Hicks here, but there's also a cruel twist on Hugh MacDiarmid: "He canna Scotland see wha' yet/Canna see the infinite"... In this case, you can't see the infinite because you're maddeningly Scottish. 

Limmy is a web-designer by trade, a Flash animator: his TV show is built on video-podcasts he's been putting together since 2006. When you go to his homepage, you come across two sections called Playthings and Pictures, which has a list of web-experiments going back to 2000. The expected laddish cruelty is there, but there's also surrealism and conceptualism - monstrous morphings of Limmy's body tangoing with itself, or playing with serial samplings of a ned's request: "I'm freezin....gie's yir fuckin' jaiket".

Is this the multiphrenia of the chemical-and-digital generation - all these "dividuals" (as Gilles Deleuze once put it) chasing tiny intense experiences, unable and unwilling to hold themselves together? (OK, I can just imagine Limmy reading that sentence out on his Justin.tv livecasts). The Comedy Unit also produces Burniston, Frankie Boyle's Tramadol Nights and Gary Tank Commander. So never mind trailing-in-the-dust intellectuals like me - these are cultural entrepreneurs out there making "the national sphincter twitch on the velvet", as one of their veterans, Phil Differ, once defined his comedy ambition to me.

I've been promoting the power of play for the last decade - and occasionally, somewhere in the world, I'll get a response along the lines of "what does a dour, Presbyterian-defined culture like Scotland know about play?" I suppose a majority of Scottish managers in the English Premiership is one answer. But the super-modern, irrepressible energy of Scottish comedy is clearly another.  

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: A green and independent Scotland will help us ride the waves of climate change

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - using the natural disaster, and nuclear meltdown, in Japan, to think about Scotland's own energy and green futures, in the context of an independence politics. And frankly, more than a slight nudge as to the effective voting intentions thereto. As usual, all comments welcome. 

* * *

The images from Japan rattle around the head, sparking off all manner of associations. The sight of towns completely levelled inescapably evokes Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The miasma of murky debris speedily sweeping across farmlands is like the formless monster in the animated films of Hayao Mizaki, particularly the "No Face" character in Spirited Away.

Between earthquakes, military defeats and out-of-control nukes of all kinds, we are reminded of the deep psyche of Japanese society. As my Osaka-based friend Momus has been saying in post after post these last few days, it is their poise, elegance and creativity in the face of such core structural instabilities that defines contemporary Japanese society.

But it is surely at the level of our environmental consciousness that Japan's disaster will have the biggest impact. Did a planet ever look more angry - tossing cars and houses and equipment about on its tides, like a god (or a Gaia) in idle, cruel play? Did modern life ever look less substantial, more secondary, to wider natural processes? 

No-one wants to leap to any causation between global warming and seismic activity - although scientists like UCL's Bill McGuire have been, for some years now, correlating the melting of polar ice-caps to an increase in vulcanism, due to reduced pressure on the earth's crust. 

But surely we have seen, if not directly experienced, enough - from Indonesia's tsumami to Australia's fires to Japan's quake - to register what a more generally turbulent climate will do to our precious modernity. And to feel the underground tremors as we stand upon our current models of prosperity and progress. 

As we watch the world's most technologically advanced society unable to contain the poisons of its cracked nuclear reactors, we are surely compelled to think of our own energy regimes. As Joan McAlpine noted yesterday, when given the chance to politicise his response to the nuclear meltdowns in Japan, Alex Salmond made a conscious (and elegant) demurral on the Sunday talk-shows.

But those outside the electoral battle can surely state it more clearly. The anti-nuclear consensus in Scottish society, stretching from Trident to nuclear power and perhaps rooted even deeper than ideological agreement, must have its political voice heard at the next election (and shamefully, as Joan points out, the Labour Party in Scotland is not part of that consensus).

This consensus doesn't merely rest on fears of environmental disaster, but can also be a positive aspiration towards a green-energy economy and society. Salmond's current restraint, as Japanese citizens float in the water, is understandable. But I hope that a campaigning vocabulary can be fashioned over the next few weeks, perhaps between the SNP and the Greens, which combines fears and hopes to make a powerful electoral appeal.

There is a fascinating parallel between discussions in the green community, and among independence-supporters in Scotland, about how each of them bridges the "imagination gap" in their political appeal to the public - the gap between things as they are, and things as they should (and need to) be. 

The great sustainability guru Tim Jackson speaks of the "huge abyss" between our current consumerist lifestyles, and the systemic changes that are required for a planet-friendly economy and society. An abyss so huge that "the distance that needs travelling can engender so much fear that it actually acts as a brake on change... The difficulty for most people is that they don't believe there is a complete system which we can jump ship to".

So a "safe bridge" is needed: "it is imperative that we are able to give indications of what it would look like and to create a spectrum of strategic interventions that develop resilience and create a vision of a sustainable future".

Independence-supporters in Scotland have constantly attempted to construct their own version of the "safe bridge" that Jackson talks about. Surely the history of sovereignty activism in Scotland, conducted under Alasdair Gray's phrase of "working in the early days of a better nation", has been precisely about trying to create that "spectrum of strategic interventions" (demonstrations, publications, Claims of Right, constitutions, and the endless books of essays).

Through these interventions, independistas try to engender a belief that the "complete system" of Scottish independence is a ship people can enthusiastically jump onto - and not a fearful abyss, needing a long rope-bridge. The more patient among us would doubtless claim that, no matter the Holyrood result in May, the imagination gap between Scotland now and a Scottish nation-state is less than it ever was. Bide your time; let the increments of change build and build.

I'm not that patient, and never have been. Salmond characterised Scotland in his party conference speech as the "lucky" country, in terms of our natural, structural and human resources. But we might be lucky in an even bigger framework. It seems to me that the practical project of a green and meaningful Scotland, with the macro-power of a nation-state to set new incentives and direct new funds towards that end, is exactly the kind of governmental "safe bridge" that Jackson hopes for.

Wouldn't an independent Scotland in which (to paraphrase the US columnist Thomas Friedman) "green is the new blue and white" provide exactly the kind of policy zeal that's needed? A sustainably-oriented patriotism, fuelling the spirit of innovation and sustaining the hard discussions required to get to Tim Jackson's "new territory"? A territory which, as he says,

... entails being more sensitive, open and transparent about environmental limits, a stronger sense of social justice, fixing the basic aspects of an economic system that is now demonstrably broken in its own terms and a shift in the underlying sense of what the good life means and the consumerist base of modern society.

In terms of political sentiment - which also means, yes, separating large numbers of Scottish Labour supporters and activists from the Unionist mind-manacles of their Westminster party - isn't there a clear and historic consensus for such a national project?

Like the First Minister, we can look to Japan and allow our hearts to respond to their collective grief, and fervently wish for them to fix the system that's unravelling around them. But we must also draw some strategic lessons from their tragedy. In this challenging century, don't we need all the steering powers we can get? And more pertinently, in our election season: what's the vote that gets us closer to achieving that resilient Scottish future?

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Big Society - Tory detox or ideological smokescreen?

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - thinking about the Tories' big idea for their Coalition government, The Big Society, and testing it against not only its most immediate critics down south, but also the Scottish context (to my mind, largely indifferent). As ever, all comments most gratefully recieved. 

* * *

I live a bi-polar life on this island: a week in Scotland, a week in London, chasing opportunities and doing family in both. I don’t know whether it affords me any particularly novel insight into the socio-political currents at either end of this landmass at the moment. But sometimes the edges rub together interestingly.

Last week, for example, was dominated by my tentative engagement with the hot idea currently attracting pundits, enterprises and other chancers to its surface, like filings to a magnet: the Tories’ (and now the Coalition’s) concept of theBig Society.

The first thing to say about it, wearing my Caledonian breeks, is how unnecessary it seems in the Scottish context – even in its guise as a detoxification of the Tory brand. With Scotland never having bought into the Thatcherite notion that there was no such thing as society, Cameron’s revisionism – “there is, but it’s not the same as the state” – has very little velcro up here.

Also, our relatively advanced constitutional set-up has meant that the SNP minority government has had to find overlaps with the Tories on their pet issues (bobbies on the beat, support for small business). But in doing so, they’ve dragged the Conservatives into the social-democratic consensus of Scottish policy on public services. They either tacitly or actively support budgets and settlements to extend or defend social provision, in ways that the deficit hawks currently running Whitehall would screech at.

However, in an England under the full writ of Westminster, the mood is much more febrile. My favourite groups down here at the moment are the Compass grouping within the Labour Party – the intelligent centre-left – and the New Economics Foundation, a green think-tank. Both are extremely lucid about what the Big Society means – essentially a cloying ideological smokescreen shrouding an audacious privatisation of public services and the welfare state.

The standard line is that the Big Society’s appeal to the joys of volunteering and social enterprise is incredibly naïve and ill-considered – as if hundreds of thousands of newly unemployed public sector workers somehow “clears the way” for charities and NGOs to fill the gaps left in social services. For example, closed libraries are now offered to communities to run on a voluntary basis – as if a public library service was an amateur activity on a par with craft classes, and should be allowed to prosper solely on the vine of local enthusiasm.

And as the NEF’s Anna Coote says, with much of the debatably-deficit-driven cuts meaning the withdrawal of grants to voluntary organisations from local councils, the Big Society comes to seem faintly pathological. They urge a new age of pro-social activism, while kicking the guts out of the fabric of charities and enterprises that could deliver it.

Even when the Big Society advocates think they’re stealing the clothes of the early socialist movement – for example, encouraging nurses to come together as cooperatives or mutuals, to pitch their caring services to newly deregulated health markets – nobody really trusts them. There have been too many slavering statements from thelarge commercial public service providers, looking forward to picking up business as these inexperienced initiatives crash and burn.

As far as the English debate goes, it seems to be that the centre-left is marshalling its arguments and forces quite well. I attended a Westminster committee-room public meeting on the topic last week: and other than the usual mist-wreathed Hogwarts-like experience of walking through the halls of the Mother of Parliaments, the speakers sounded completely tooled-up and ready for the coming few years of battle.

But I’d had a strange experience with the writings of the single Tory represented in that meeting, Jesse Norman MP (author of a book on The Big Society) – an experience which I agonised over in a lunchtime seminar to the Young Foundation last Tuesday. On the Monday, I’d been wearing another of my London hats as a creative consultant – devising strategies to convince large companies that they should adopt a play-based approach to their ad and marketing expenditure. We cited the work of computer-games analyst Sebastian Deterding, for whom the test of a great game experience is that it allows “meaning, mastery and autonomy”.

That evening, preparing for the next day’s presentation by reading Norman’s book, I came upon a passage where he talked about the main motivational drives behind the Big Society, which were – you guessed it – “meaning, mastery and autonomy”. I worried away at this for about an hour, in discussion and slides, with the collected wonks and wonkettes.

So, shock-horreur: does this mean that my play-advocacy, after all these years, is really an example of blithe New Tory incoherence (at best), or mendacity (at worst)? Ehm, no. But what it did sharpen up is my sense of how unscrupulous the Cameronistas are in their attempt to unravel English social infrastructure before the next general election.

It’s very easy to see the Big Society as an attempt to gull the aspirational and “creative” classes into supporting widescale privatisation, by talking their beloved language – specifically, appealing to their desire to achieve personal wellbeing through pro-social activities.

Even if one puts to the side the accurate objections of the centre-left, the Big Society falls down on its own terms, unravelled by the Oscar Wilde one-liner about the problem with socialism: “it will take too many evenings”. One might imagine that there could be a joyful, playful volunteerism to be pursued – if the Conservatives got tough with business and regulated for a shorter working week (say 30 hours), without a directly proportionate wage reduction.

This would provide a rich systemic support to all that volunteering which, of course, has already been going on (one of the sharpest objections to the Big Society is that it’s an opportunistic re-branding of what already exists). But really, can you imagine a party that’s brazen enough to preach democracy in Egypt, while hawking arms to Arab autocracies, taking that kind of stand against squealing employers?

So, an odd few days in Londinium. I regularly meet many good, solid and intelligent people there; but I’m gradually becoming aware that – even before any constitutional upheavals – there is already an inexorable break-up of Britain going on, in terms of basic policy agendas.

Some places are even odder, though. The two headlines that met me at Glasgow Central Station were, on the progressive side, Scottish Labour falling in with everyone else on the end of tuition fees; and on the regressive side, the snarling pointlessness of Old Firm machoism. “I’ll ha’e nae hauf-way hoose, but aye be/Whaur extremes meet”, Hugh Macdiarmid once wrote. Exhausting, but true.

 

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: In the age of the iPad and Kindle, libraries are to be defended, not emptied

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - a small intervention in the debate about public sector cuts, but a large paen to my favourite kind of public building, a big city library. But also about how our defense of these spaces has to creatively consider what the Net, and e-books, are doing to our conception of public writing and reading. As ever, all comments welcome.

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There is much righteous and articulate protest at the moment about the fate of libraries, in the era of deficit-justified public sector cuts. The children's writer Philip Pullman has delivered an all-time brilliant speech in defence of libraries, as spaces of generosity and civility against the exhausting competitiveness of market culture.

And me, I'm the world's greatest fan of libraries. Many of my weekdays in Scotland are spent at the Mitchell Library - huge, comfortable, well-wifi'd, splendidly lunchable, still stocked with university-level resources for general public use, and about to launch its serious-minded books festival, Aye Write.

The library was the original "third place", a zone for people to contemplate and connect between work and home, well before branded coffee-shops and boutique malls. And any society worth its salt (perhaps Great, rather than Big) would be thinking about how to build on the public library - a supportive civic platform for new generations of workers and players, part-timers and freelancers, parents and singletons, trying to find the resources to shape their lives in unstable times. 

Suffice to say that the Coalition's vision of deprofessionalised, volunteer-run libraries doesn't quite match up. 

But beyond defending libraries as part of our social commonwealth, we do have to grapple a little with some bits of technology - the internet, and now e-books - that complicate a simple battleground of cuts and anti-cuts.

The evolution of my beloved Mitchell, over the thirty years I've been using it, is the paradigm example. When I first entered as an undergraduate in 1981, you'd trot upstairs to an almost literally transcendent Philosophy And Religion department, or wander over to a Social Sciences or Humanities or Technology and Science floor - the proper academic disciplines, open to the passing punter. 

All of them were stacked with the latest journals. |ndeed, my first experience of surfing knowledge, before Netscape and a plastic mouse came into my life, was the Mitchell's periodicals shelves. Some urbane librarian had placed Harper's Magazine next to New Scientist next to Electric Word (the predecessor to Wired magazine). I'd be lost for hours in the spectacle, greedily putting together my world views, fleshing out my hunches. 

But the Mitchell I face today, as I settle down with my Macbook to sup from the municipal wireless, is both much less, and only a little more. A scant periodicals list, and once mighty realms of knowledge scrunched into rooms on single floors. Entire floors given over to what seems like genealogy and Glasgow nostalgia; a business section which at least gives you free access to online commercial news archives, but which otherwise seems overly un-enterprising. 

However, the aforementioned cyberspace- and a generous supply of electric power-points - turns what would otherwise seem like a shell of its former glory, into a comfortable, solid basis for the hive-mind of freelance Glasgow. I regularly meet film-makers like Peter McDougall, or think-tankers like Graham Leicester, or writers like Ewan Morrison, or any number of non-office-able dudes, pecking away at their mobile or fixed keyboards at various levels of the building.

The webcafe on the ground floor is easily the most cosmopolitan space in this city - every shade and brogue on the planet using their allotted free hour to throw virtual tendrils of love, money or power, as the globalized world spins them around.

And the books are still there, now lendable as well as for reference. But there's no doubt that the internetting of libraries brings a challenge to the librarian's core vocation. At this point, we enter into the babel of debates about the future of the book in the digital and networked age - and quite rightly, the librarian asks some very sharp questions.

 What does it mean to manage and curate a collection for the benefit of the citizen, if - say - 50% of the same reference material can be accessed via a smart phone on the bus home? Given its current state of patchiness and murky commercial ambition, how could something like Google Books even remotely replace a good municipal supply of canonical and disciplinary texts?

The new boom in e-books (due to attractive and efficient new e-readers like the Kindle and iPad) is ensnared in a thicket of digital copyrights. The publishing business has observed the meltdown of the music business, and is trying to make sure they aren't as easily eviscerated by the copy-anything power of the web.

Yet, the librarian asks, what does it mean to lend a book in this environment? Does the idea of turning off the reader's access to the e-book from a central point - remember Amazon's accidental removal of Orwell's 1984 from Kindle - actually revive the notion of fines and returns? Or will a mad plethora of competing e-book standards, copyrights and devices be too much for a public library system to cope with, if digital devices ever become the dominant mode of book consumption?

I'm a Kindle user since just before Xmas: and in terms of my mobile lifestyle, I am thrilled to be amassing a portion of the research library for my next book in something I can slip between the pages of a Ryman's notepad. For me, no more slow separation of my vertebrae due to a volume-overloaded back-pack for me. But this seems, and is, a real privatisation of my resources: a step back from those tendencies the library and the web share, to make information and knowledge a commons.

I just realised the other day that I can't, or can't easily, lend any of these quite cheaply acquired books to anyone. That feels wrong, retrograde. I wonder if these restrictions are only a hiatus on the way to the state of stoicism about copyright that we have in the music business.

Will the book become just as decommodified as the album or song? Less an object to be reliably sold, more a stimulus to community - a community that will pay for scarce pleasures (the presence of the author, his work made into a beautiful object), but will expect story and concept to be cheap or free? Yes, a fertile currency of discussion - but hardly a chunk of pulped wood to be sold with a hidden margin. 

So much is up in the air at the moment, so many pieces yet to settle. But the last thing I'd want to go along with is the kind of glib technophilia so characteristic of many self-proclaimed "social entrepreneurs" - that there is some inevitable new order of readers and writers bubbling up naturally from the dot-com chaos.

As a CyberNat - in the best sense, I hope - I would want there to be a nation-state dimension to how we think about digital literary copyright. And even if those new copyright regimes are European or transnational, I would want a Scottish voice to be arguing in those halls of power for the classic librarian's virtues of fair use and public access - even in the age of electronic ink and touch-screens. 

But however wireless and permanently connected we are - however much we can make any coffee house our own research centre, with the right devices - we should value the enabling, non-commercial capacity and stability of a public library. It's a physical space we should give to ourselves, to honour our own seriousness about our lives. It can improve and develop, to complement our new tools and sensibilities. The library is to be defended, not emptied.

Pat Kane's Cal Merc column: the poverty of ideas behind Scottish party politics

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - responding to a new opinion poll which puts the SNP back in contention for the coming Scottish Parliament elections in May. And though my votes for independence parties are already cast, I'm not too excited about the culture of ideas behind it all. As ever, all comments welcome. 

 * * *

As an long-term independista, I wish I could get all excited, and party like it was 2007 again. With a new poll from Ipsos MORI putting the SNP slightly ahead of Labour in both constituency and regional votes, it seems that we have an electoral race again for Holyrood in May.

The controversial Brian Soutar and his hundreds of thousands are back in Salmond’s campaign money-box; new partisan online publications like Newsnet Scotland (and others in the blogosphere) are correcting Unionist weightings in the mainstream media; even the mother of my children is standing as an SNP candidate in the South of Scotland.

And I’ll be voting my usual constituency (SNP) and party list (Green) preferences. But after those duties are performed, I will revert to my current ho-hum attitude towards existing party politics in Scotland, and beyond.

Yes, I’m pleased to hear that Alex Salmond’s big idea for the Scottish election is that Scotland should become a “powerhouse of the world’s marine energy industry”. With the Royal Society commending Scottish education for its production of science students, our democratic intellect already seems set up to produce a generation of green-tinged engineers and scientists – would that we had the macro-powers to create a better business context for them.

I prefer this energy emphasis, certainly, than thumping on about coal and oil assets, which just staves off Scotland’s reckoning with the low-carbon future. (The operations of “Scottish business winners” like Cairn Energy, rampantly buccaneering for oil reserves in India and Greenland, are hardly suitable for any election manifesto.)

Having been part of the petro-problem over the last 40 years, Scotland seems extraordinarily lucky that it’s now poised to become part of the sustainable-solution. If top-down, big-picture Scottish nationalism justifies itself in any realm (other than the removal of Trident), it’s the argument for more regulatory and economic powers to support the green renaissance of Scottish manufacturing.

But no matter how attractive the policy horizon, we know this routine of existing politics. Capable leaders drill their messages through whatever media they can, to get to an electorate with a once-in-four-years chance of turning their citizens’ consciousness into a political act. This empowers an expertocracy of representatives, civil servants and advisors to get on with it, while we get on with our daily lives.

Many of us who were constitutionally active in the 1980s and 90s hoped that an achieved Scottish parliament would be better than this largely passive process. It would exist in a sea of energetic democracy – waves of petitioning and campaigns that would remind former activists sitting in the chamber of the ideals that put them there.

Hasn’t really happened, has it? The commentator Gerry Hassan has been relentless in his critique of the complacent “establishment” of devolution-era Scotland – and has found himself recently backed up by the head of a major Labour think-tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research. Where is Scotland’s salon society,  asks Hassan – the busy public sphere of idea-merchants and open meetings that keeps official politics on its toes?

Hassan adeptly analyses what currently squats in its place: a bureaucratic-Labourist complex of bought-over civil society groups, self-satisfied professional bodies, and constrained conventional media spaces. But other than a few bright spots in the blogosphere,  events like Changin’ Scotland and our burgeoning book festivals,  it’s difficult not to agree with Nick Pearce of the IPPR that the overall Scottish policy debate is a rather moribund culture.

Beyond the coming ding-dong of battling parties, how does the ideas dimension of the political debate become more vibrant in Scotland? To my memory, what typified the “Radical Scotland”  of the 1980s and 90s (the title of that era’s definitive political magazine) was a crucial alliance between the poverty-driven anger (both economic and spiritual poverty) of Scottish schemes and ruralities, and a constitutionally ambitious Central Belt middle-class.

With the implosion of the street-left in the vanitas of comrade Sheridan, a conduit was lost between these two forces – which, let’s not forget, had its opportunity to be part of the Scottish parliamentary process in 2003–07.

Maybe an articulation of the raw edge of need, despair and anger would inject some life into Scottish politics – and perhaps dynamise some of the bottom-up structures currently struggling.

What’s interesting about the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings is that a net-enabled generation examined their police-state adversaries and came up with a politics of protest that was genuinely imaginative. Young activists began to stage creative actions that subtly reclaimed the streets: flash mobbing in city centres to sing the national anthem, dressing in black to stand silently before the Nile.

And their street tactics for their initial “day of rage” on January 25  – in the words of activist Ahmed Salah, “we wanted to be multi-polar, fast-moving, and too mobile for the amin markazi [central security forces]” – sounds exactly like the kind of collaborative, lateral-thinking play that is celebrated in computer games.

Interactive culture of all kinds has shaped a new sense of civic confidence among Arab youth. But they had the brutal, often fatal experience of the police/state oppression of daily life in Egypt to contend with, giving their seriously-playful activisms some real urgency. Is life anywhere in Scotland as desperate as this?

Certainly some of the schemes that the Scottish Socialist Party traversed – in areas where drugs, crime, depression and gang violence dominated – provide daily experiences of peril (as I wrote about recently)  which wouldn’t be all that distinguishable from the world’s mega-slums. We are missing a politics of the poorest in Scotland at the moment. Whether it could be inspired by the brave, bold and innovative tactics of the Arab street movements is quite another question.

So enjoy the Punch-and-Judy show of Scottish party politics over the next few months. For those who have the mental resources to enjoy the high ground of grand policy, the game is worth the candle, performed across the usual media and High St outlets. But there are gaping holes in the thought process of the Scottish body politic, which all the posters and leaflets will not paper over.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: The revolution will be Twitterised (and Al-Jazeera'd)

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - the product of more than a few days spent obsessed with the current Egyptian uprising, via all the new media forms and continuous live feeds that exists to keep the armchair viewer of world history occupied. At the end, some rueful reflections on the comparative bathos of the coming Scottish Election. All comments welcome. 

* * *

Gil Scott-Heron once sang that the revolution will not be televised. The Tunisian revolution, and the continuing Egyptian uprising, would seem to refute the great man’s chorus. But it’s worth returning to the last lines of the original lyric: “the revolution will be no re-run, brothers … the revolution will be live.”

And indeed it has not been an edited package, “brought to you by Xerox, in four parts without commercial interruptions”, as Scott-Heron once growled. Via Twitter, BBC Online and the continuous live web transmissions of Al Jazeera English, it has been very easy to set aside my daily world of gigs, commissions and bills, and be an armchair witness to history.

Al Jazeera English, in particular, has been fascinating. With anchors and journalists from Britain, the US and the middle-East, it’s been like watching BBC and CNN liberated from the usual ideological manacles that contain English-speaking news discourse about civil unrest.

State heads like Obama, Mubarak and his hastily appointed new cabinet have certainly had their pronouncements dutifully covered. But it’s Al Jazeera’s prior and substantial presence in Egypt – with scores of journalists already in the bureaus, and (after the station was evicted from the country in the last few days) anonymously phoning in reports from the streets of Cairo and Alexandria – that has rendered the most extraordinary record of events.

Covertly recording footage from rooftops, combined with eyewitness accounts on satellite phones, they’ve captured the early joy and exhilaration of the occupation of Liberation Square, and the current slide into near civil war, as the anti-government masses desperately defend their occupation of this symbolic space.

The minute-to-minute reportage has been, to these eyes and ears, properly balanced. They’ve not just recorded the unpredictable miasma of events that a leaderless street revolution brings, but also allowed an impressive Egyptian intelligentsia to inform the agenda of what’s happening.

We should perhaps call them netocrats – so many are self-described as bloggers and social media experts. On a roundtable I watched in the early days of the uprising, Al Jazeera gathered together a youthful trio that exuded intelligence, charisma and a profound distrust of any vertical leadership, including that of the Nobel Peace Prize winning nuclear weapons inspector El-Baradei.

They sounded like a graduate generation, their awareness of better standards of democracy and development amplified by social media and the internet – all this building up a swell of impatience with the steely paternalism of the Mubarak regime. And let’s not forget their inspiration by the thoroughly cyber-spaced Tunisian revolution – which used Wikileaks’s leaked cables about Tunisian political corruption as the spark to mobilise a similarly educated and connected graduate class.

Some of these Egyptian netocrats are exiled in major metropolises. But they’re using both top-down and bottom-up information tools in order to become their own personalised news channels. They not only aggregate comment from friends, family and colleagues on the ground through social media, but also drive traffic to these aggregations through pugnacious tv interviews.

Foremost among these is Mona Eltahawy, currently all over US and UK TV and the Twittersphere, in which she assiduously re-tweets voices and accounts from the literal heart of the revolution (like Mosa’ab Elshamy, Sharif Kouddous, and Ramy Raoof). Follow these feeds, and you’re right at the core of the spectacle in Tahrir Square.

In this thoroughly reverberating net-world, you can also make direct personal connections with like-minded souls, through very simple and direct means. At the beginning of the uprising, I tweeted an image I found on the BBC website – a photo of protestors linking arms to protect the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo from looters.

The text that accompanied the image was: “The human wall protecting Cairo museum. So beautiful”. Which it was: a row of men, in civilian clothes, looking fearful but determinedly defending their heritage.

Since then, I’ve seen that my tweet has been distributed (or as they say, re-tweeted) thousands of times – my original text retained, and framed with several languages from both hemispheres. Yes, there have since been reports of museum lootings and destruction of artefacts, though with Cairenes and the army combining again to protect the treasures within.

But in the meantime, my text and image just keeps getting passed on from hopeful idealist to hopeful idealist around the world. People seem to want an idea that defies the narratives of chaos and destruction shaping most news reports on the Egyptian uprising.

It’s a subtle and moving image. What it communicates is that revolution isn’t just about unleashing the unruly masses, but also can be a wise and informed act of self-determination. That an uprising can be just as aware of what needs to be protected, as well as what must be overthrown. Does it misrepresent what’s happening on the streets of Cairo right now? Undoubtedly. But in the politics of the networked world, it can be just as important to transmit inspiration as information.

The multitudinous revolutionaries of the Egyptian street need as much help as they can get. As an image of national transformation conducted with civility and wisdom, I’d be more than happy if it helped to re-define the national brand of the new Egypt – where the soft power of reason and democracy triumphs over the hard power of Mubarak’s police state.

And one last thought, as the rocks fly across Liberation Square. Compared to these heroes, we in Scotland have such a tiny, peaceable distance to travel, in the journey from devolution to statehood. It would be a delight if the vitriol on both sides of this argument in the coming Holyrood election was thinned out, as we remembered the sight of millions of unarmed Egyptian citizens making light of army tanks and state police.

If it happens at least once, I’ll tweet it for you. Don’t expect it to go viral, though. And “The Devolution May Well Be Re-Revised” isn’t that much of a chorus line, either.

Pat Kane's Cal Merc column: where do Peter Mullen's "Neds" fit into the story of Scotland's future?

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - inspired by a viewing of Peter Mullan's new, largely autobiographical movie, Neds, and a few congruent encounters with some damaged young souls on Central Belt commuter trains. The sense of wasted potential, and the distance between that and larger frameworks of Scottish progress, is mused upon. All comments welcome. 

* * *

Walking down from the train station, Coatbridge on a Sunday night: and out of the depths of your podcast, someone’s finger jabs you in the arm. There’s a nano-second of tension and readiness, until I see the broad, clear-skinned face of a mid-teen girl, tall and warmly dressed. But she’s obviously scared, and already talking as I pull out my earphones.

“… So mister are you going down this hill? I canny walk on ma own, see there’s people I might meet here who are gonnae do me, they’ve said they’re gonnae get me the night if they see me…” I quickly agree. As we walk, I try to sift through her babble.

How’s school? “No at school. Hit a teacher wi’ a chair when I was seven. She shouted right in ma face, there wis spittle coming aff her! So ah gave her an answer!” Are you going back to your mum or dad? “My dad’s in jile for murder. I don’t talk tae ma mum. I’m in care.”

We march along, as she spiels out a tangled skein of boyfriends, territories, intoxicants. I try another note of concern: don’t you think you should be getting away from this bunch? “Oh I canny … but … In two years I’m going down to Derby?” Why? “All my pals from the home went down there”. What are they doing? “Some at college, some working. That’s where I’m off tae, fuckin’ ooty here.” What do you want to be? She turns her shining face to me, deadpan. “I’m trainin’ to be a beauty therapist.”

We get to her safety zone, at the corner of the town’s West End Park, and the aspirant beatifier strides off. You take care now, ok? “Aye, ah’ll dae ma best,” she says cheerily, skipping along like a universal daughter.

It must be a combination of my non-driver’s life on trains, combined with freelance hours that put me in the deadspots and dregs of a day, but I do seem to harvest stories like this. A few months ago, late at night again, a broken wee guy with a red crescent scar on his cheek unstoppably told me his story. “On the methadone, I’m no’ doing too bad… but I’ve gottae stay away from ma brer [brother], he’s bad news, always gets us intae it…”

Suddenly a change of tack. “You gettin’ ready for holidays?” I might do Italy in summer. “Aye I’ve done Italy. Poland, Germany, France too”. That’s busy: how, when? “I used to represent Scotland fur Tai-Kwan-Do. I’ve no goat ma medals now. It was my care worker in the home, he was a trainer, goat me intae it.” Now that I look at him, he’s a wiry guy – though there’s glue poured into his consciousness, a slurring on his lips.

I can’t help asking: so what happened, then? “Aww…” Head down and to the window. “My brer again. He’s a header, pulled me intae it. But it wis me that showed the blade, I wis the one that got done … I can only blame masel’, mucker, it’s ma fuckin’ load.” He rallies again, wanting to present well. “I mean, I got intae a fight the other day cause this guy wouldn’t give’s seat up for an auld doll. I fuckin’ made ‘im … But, ‘er ye go, wrang again.”

I had these two in my head yesterday, as my feet turned me away from another train journey and towards the Glasgow Film Theatre, to watch Peter Mullen’s new movie, Neds. The first thing to say is that Neds shouldn’t be read too sociologically.

The journey depicted – bright dux of his primary school is dragged down by early 70’s gang culture, oppressive father and brutal schooling, and turned into knife-wielding, overcompensatingly-violent street thug – seems to be, going by his interviews, mostly Mullen’s own (with a few symbolic embellishments). The film’s main character ends up a crescent-scarred delinquent bashing out metal in the remedial classes – but even so, he’s reading Jung and Marx under the workbench.

And it’s only someone possessing an innate dramatic talent that could come up with a closing scene as profound asNeds. Two boys, both bent out of shape by their casually violent circumstances, one of whom has already beaten the other into imbecility, tiptoe through a pride of lions in their local safari park (their tour bus has broken down). As the boys pass among the animals, desperately holding onto each others’ hand in their crumpled school uniforms, these natural predators sit with an implacable magnificence: a reproach to every tooled-up tough-guy.

Mullen’s point here is, I think, truly ambiguous. As an academic noted in the Sundays, some current street gangs have been around for nearly a century – cross-generational rites of male teenage passage for school-age youth, in industrial (and now post-industrial) localities.

So do we read the boys shuffling through the lions as a sign of how artificial and consciously willed their human disputes are – and thus, how remediable too, with enough mindfulness and social resources? Or is Mullen saying – along with many recent psychologists – that there are no “good old days” for the potential for gangs and violence at this stage of young male development? That it’s as natural as a lion pride?

If the latter, then reports of current initiatives that aim to woo the neds away from their gangs with alternative exuberances and solidarities – mostly sport, it would seem, and new jobs as “youth workers” – will work. If gangs are a form of play, then most attractive, less destructive play-forms should be promoted.

But games and sports that siphon off excessive energies, or social employment that amounts to a bribe not to fight, are ultimately poor development options here. World history is going to be so much more demanding of these kids than that.

We live under a globalisation where more and more of the Western ex-proletariat will be surplus to economic requirements. Other workshops of the world are making their ascent. Human-substituting automations of all kinds are creeping their way into business strategies.

Our only hope in Scotland is a democratic intellectualism worth the name – a mass cognitive and creative society, in which Scottish skill levels and products/services are practised at a high, non-outsourceable level.

If we don’t get there, we will consign millions of our compatriots to permanent economic redundancy – as Jimmy Reid once explicitly warned – and all the downward spirals of self-esteem which that generates. Do we want community tribalism, or vampiric drugs culture, filling this gap where purposelessness and uselessness lives?

Yes, I’ll allow myself a light bang of the drum for independence, as one way of fomenting general Scottish positivity and can-do spirit, through national control of our structures and resources. But in the phrase of our universal daughter at the beginning of this piece, this country also needs as large a dose of “beauty therapy” as it can take.

However much I enjoyed Neds, when I finished I immediately wanted to see 10, 20, 50 Scottish movies that filled in the gaps between this and, say, the softer elements of Gregory’s Girl. The more powerful stories we can tell about the subtle struggles between conformity and transformation in the everyday life of Scotland, the better.

The very existence of Mullen’s films would seem to be a testament to the fact that a strong sensibility can burn through the most unwelcoming of environments. But perhaps we need more ned filmmakers, not just registered beauticians or refereed combatants – and that’s before we even get to the scientists or engineers.

Perhaps we need more compelling audio-visual narratives about the latent and diverse talents of Scottish life – more than just the occasional art movie, or the simplicities of crime or soap operas: and this is a real challenge to whatever we might mean by a “creative” Scotland. If my regular commutes are anything to go by, it’s not as if the stories aren’t out there.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Obama's lean frame is a conduit for the furies of American decline

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - a departure from the usual Scottish agenda (well the column is called "Notes From Everywhere"). Obama's memorial speech after the Tuscon shootings revived my interest in his flagging presidency - and tugged at my own deep identification with American culturally, if not politically. All comments welcome. 

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I have America in my head when I think, in my throat when I sing, in my heart when I feel idealistic. Much of this is inescapable for me. It's rooted in a childhood shaped by a father's vocal fixation with Sinatra and Darin; by my teenage love of science fiction (which mostly came with an American accent); and by a music, media and net career which has regularly looped across the Atlantic for nearly quarter of a century now.

These days, even in the early days of a better wee nation, it's not that much different. My daughter is in her final semester of an engineering degree at MIT; her father has an invitation to be an artist-in-residence at Princeton University in the spring of 2012. My Facebook and Twitter feeds come as much from the East and West coasts of the US, as they do from Glasgow, Edinburgh or London; my most regularly played daily podcast is Tom Ashbrook's OnPoint talk show, from WBUR in Boston (founded, incidentally, by a wandering genius Scot). 

My one remaining dream - most of the rest have had a reasonable dent put in them - is to make it musically in America. Because the sounds that make me surge most come from that nation's most inimitable, most admirable traditions: the cry of the gospel church in the soul of Aretha, Marvin and Stevie, the wail of truth and freedom in the jazz of Coltrane, Davis, Elling.

To see Obama elected in 2008 - that very man, in his very historical and racial specificity - was an extremely personal event for me. This white boy had been playing that funky music, and identifying with the expansive, inclusive, exciting America it represented, for a long time. To see those values become a mainstream political achievement, rather than just a great rousing chorus or two, was something I was literally glad to be alive to see.

So yes, if you want the very model of a Scottish Americanophile, I'm right here.

But as I've been observing the national angst over the injuries and deaths at the Tuscon Safeway in Arizona, where Representative Gabrielle Giffords's "Congress on the Corner" was strafed by Jared Loughner's repeating handgun, I've been reminded of the continuous counter-story in my breast about America.

To be honest, it was there from the beginning of my Transatlantic romance. Recording in New York in the late 80's was creatively thrilling, but often socially dispiriting. You'd take cab rides where the cabbie would be assaulted through the window by psychopathic bikers. You'd pass by huge vagrant women holding out their open leg sores to the sun at Columbus Circle. You'd wander down to Wall Street and see twisted scraps of disabled beggars be sneered at by pinstriped bankers. For the artistic classes, a great city: for the rest, at that time, closer to Taxi Driver than On The Town.

In my mid-90's American series for BBC Radio Scotland, I'd moved into the heartlands, and talked to militant gunmen in Oklahoma, scarily defiant, six months before the bombing. I met a writer called Susan Strange and her then husband Duane, living in Riverside near LA: he took me out to his garage to show me his personal armoury, lifting the swing door to display the Glocks and shotguns proudly to his passing neighbours.

The academics I talked to split evenly between advocates for the ameliorating qualities of American constitutionalism (like Ronald Dworkin, Lawrence Lessig and John Kenneth Galbraith) and realists about the violent, extremist potentialities of American identity (like Noam Chomsky, Lewis Lapham and Mike Davis).

I watched Obama's memorial speech at the Arizona stadium the other day, and I heard the calm, professorial, rhetorically considered tones of the former group: the product of academic parenting, good schooling and elite acceptance in places like Harvard. But this delivered from the body of a visibly diasporic son of Africa, bearing a "funny" full name (his term) that invokes Islam, Kenya and recent sworn national enemy.

This is a voice also full of the cadences of the black American church, where telling it to the mountaintop presages the building of the shining city on the hill. Taken together, all these fusions and encompassings, it's as if Obama was designed in a laboratory for exactly this historical moment: educator- and healer-in-chief indeed.

But you look at Obama's preternatural calm, remarked upon by those behind the stage as well as those reviewing it, and you wonder whether he knows his job is to tend to wounds in the American Dream that will not, cannot close over - like those open sores on that poor lady's legs at Columbus Circle.

I've listened to scores of American radio podcasts over the last few years where pundits make it extremely clear that certain tendencies of American prowess are either inexorably declining, or even need to be reversed. The ex-general Andrew Bacevich, who in 2007 lost a son in Iraq, is withering about what he calls the "Washington Rules" - a continuing military-industrial complex for whom 9/11 was their last-gasp legitimation, and whose reckless geopolitical arrogance spills blood, wastes billions and generates more enemies than any faltering hegemon could hope to cope with.

In the last few weeks, NYT columnist Tom Friedman regaled listeners with his experience of flying back to Los Angeles Airport from a Chinese megacity (not even the biggest). He summed it up as "going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones". There, futuristic conference stadia are built in eight months. In his home town, he's been waiting six months to get a local escalator fixed. 

In a lucid but sometimes hysterical book called Hot, Flat and Crowded, Friedman punts the idea that "green is the new red, white and blue". Not only is it economically urgent to patent new non-carbon-emitting processes before the Chinese do, it's a patriotic duty - a way for America to show it can use its smarts and technology for civilisational construction, rather than military destruction. (Scotland needs its own version of the same national narrative).

Progressive voices like these - voices I recognise, from the open-minded, capable America I've sought out all my adult life - clearly lurk in and around the Obama project. They are muffled by the gridlock of the American political system, and were recently deafened by Tea Party populism and the howl of right-wing media feedback. Noam Chomsky asks us to decipher the confused rage of Tea Party supporters - that is, to listen to working Americans beached by globalisation and runaway financial elites - and part-blames Obama for serving the wrong interests. 

The US left, represented in the media by the redoubtable Arianna Huffington, are right to make their charges against Obama. An economy wrestled away from speculation and towards green production; a medical system moved clearly to a European single-payer model, facing down the avarice of private health-providers. All they ask for is strong leadership towards a consensus on sustainable economic progress that most Northern governments - and almost certainly most East Asian and South American governments - implicitly accept, no matter their electorial eddies and swirls. 

But whether you make the link between crosshairs on an election graphic, and bullets across a parking lot, or not - and Obama's Arizona stadium speech asks us, subtly, to do both - it seems to me that this massacre has made something very obvious: that American national identity has been in the midst of something like a collective mental breakdown over the last few years. 

The body bags are continually funnelling back from what is supposed to be an Afghan war with an exit date. So it might seem preposterous to think that the disruptive shock of the Tuscon shootings represent a point of psychological rock-bottom for the country, from which a viable, calmer, more rational American identity can be constructed.

But there was something about the sad poise of Obama the other night that felt like their last, best hope - a sense of his lean frame being the therapeutic conduit for the confusion and hurt of this Imperial Republic, forced to take a "dose of humility" not just among themselves, but from the world as well. As a long-term fan of the America that follows its better angels, I hope my intuition isn't entirely misguided.

For more, go to Pat Kane's blogs at The Play Ethic and Thoughtland

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: the energy question fuelling the contradictions of Scottish independence

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - a rich day's news in the Scottish papers, and a few pegs on which to hang some thoughts about the thorny issues of defence and energy policy for the independence movement. Should we be in the business of lamenting lost UK MOD jobs, or promoting our carbon-intensive industries as the climate crisis worsens? Your thoughts, please. 

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Emerging from the season's convivialities, with my nose deep in tomes about climate-crisis and social psychology, it's been a cauld blast returning to Scotland's news agenda. The Scottish government's press office has clearly pushed its pedal to the metal in the last few days. Wednesday's papers were full of neatly placed stories featuring terribly dynamic SNP representatives (with sports minister Shona Robison looking braw but raw on the Aviemore slopes).

Yet the page two leads display all the contradictions of Nationalist politics aimed at defending "the Scottish interest", however flexibly that is conceived. Angus Robertson, the SNP's lead representative in Westminster, regularly draws the short straw in having to publicly fight for Scotland's share of UK defence spending. Yesterday Robertson was complaining that Scotland had "lost out" on 10,500 jobs and £5.6 billion in spending over the last decade, and was facing a future where "one in four service posts were cut".

"Conventional UK armed forces will become concentrated in 'supergarrisons' and bases. commanded and trained almost exclusively in the South of England", continued Robertson. And the problem is, Angus? Not much, for those of us who reach for Hamish Henderson's Freedom Come A' Ye before they can mouth a single line of Flower of Scotland: "Nae mair will our bonnie callants/Merch tae war when oor braggarts crousely craw..." 

How much historical irony would there be in a Tory-led Coalition, swingeing its axe at public expenditure, doing more to demilitarise Scottish identity than all the bards, playwrights and protestors combined? It's a strange feeling to be at one with a Tory Scotland Office minister when he warns that "Scotland's defences would be reduced to little more than a handful of fisheries protection vessels". Again, instead of being a critique, shouldn't that be an aspiration?

A party that's set itself against Trident and Middle-East adventuring, having to defend its stake in a military-industrial complex that brings jobs to both the barrack sodjers and the hi-tech industrial sectors (never mind naval ports still tending to nuclear warheads)? To say the least, defence is a continuing incoherence for the independence agenda. For myself, it's an example of having to take sides in Scotland (in Jim Sillars's words), as much as taking Scotland's side - that is, the left side.

Below that item, another production of the SNP press office, provoking a future scenario in which those very same fisheries protection vessels might well be deployed. Western Isles MSP Alasdair Allan is backing Barra fishermen in their opposition to the establishment of a marine reserve around Rockall, which might potentially affect their catches brought in from around that area, worth around £1.6 million to the island. 

Rockall also pops up in another Wednesday story, which reports that the UN is to examine Denmark's recently asserted claim to the islet of Rockall and its surrounding continental shelf (competing with Iceland, Ireland and the UK's existing claim). Rockall is 300 miles west of Scotland, a rather pointless chunk of rock 19m high, 25m across, 30m wide... but with possible deposits of natural oil and gas in the seabed around it.

Again, as the massed armies of doorsteppers and well-suited tele-politicians get ready for their ideological salvoes leading up to the May elections, it's fascinating to recall some of the craggier undersides of Scottish power politics. For example, the Scottish fishing industry is one of those parallel economic realities of this nation which barely surfaces in the largely-Central-Belt dominated news agenda. 

Even its language is quite beautifully other. Wikipedia tells us that it's best to divide the Scottish fishing fleet into its demersal (sea-bottom), Nephrops (crustacean) and pelagic (mid-sea) sectors. But beyond the chippy (sorry) defences of Scottish fisherman's trawling rights and quotas, it's actually quite comforting to know that our fishing industry comes under post-national European governance - a process whereby environmental, economic and territorial rights are equilibriated by rooms full of contending Eurocrats, experts, and national politicians. They share a realisation that fish stocks could provoke the ultimate 'tragedy of the commons' - where insufficient regulation exhausts a shared but finite resource - if the long view is not taken across all parties. 

It strikes me there's probably a lot of geopolitical wisdom to be plumbed from the Scottish fishing industry (it's now on my clearly insufficient radar). And interesting to see Alasdair Allan, always one to watch in the SNP firmament, take it on so stridently.

But the question of who actually possesses Rockall involves much bigger players, and much higher stakes, than the the crab-fishing lobbyists of Barra. What an independent Scotland would do with newly discovered resources of oil and gas - if Rockall was transferred to Scottish sea-bed sovereignty, or via any other discovery - is a much trickier question than the tub-thump of "it's Scotland's oil" would indicate.

As I said at the beginning, I'm deep down in the literature of climate crisis at the moment, researching for my follow-up to The Play Ethic. And if there is any message that thunders out from the literature before me - in terms of how we prevent a catastrophic increase in global warming - it is the sheer toxicity of oil and coal as the energy drivers of developed and developing economies. (Though natural gas, according to these gurus, is a somewhat more helpful resource.)

I think there will have to be a dawning (though painful) realisation among Scottish nationalists that, yes, we have missed the boat on the benefits of Scottish oil - but in other ways than the obvious lament for thirty lost years of a Norwegian-style oil fund.

Our old centre-left arguments about Thatcherism pissing the infrastructural benefits of the North Sea up against the wall of consumerism, property and speculation have to be amended. For these were also the years when terrifying, exponential rates of damage to the carrying-capacity of this planet were inflicted, by a model of development equally shared by left and right - a notion of economic growth-through-production-and-consumption, predicated on easy energy from carbon-spewing sources. If the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change is correct, that model and notion has to change drastically, implying huge changes for the basic experience of living in modern Scotland.

Yet the discourse from all of the mainstream parties in Scotland about national economic development still talks about "levers to growth" - as if "growth" itself wasn't under the most exacting scrutiny at the moment, from environmentalists and other perspectives (like the Sarkozy Commission on new measurements of economic progress which Joseph Stiglitz, now a Scottish economic advisor, served on).

As I've proposed elsewhere, the renewable energy sector in Scotland is still the strongest possible synthesis of different elements of Scottish progress – involving native talent, natural resource, and the need for control over market conditions that create incentives for innovation and dynamism. 

But if we don't squarely face our complicity in a carbon-heavy economy - which certainly implicates car-intensive road developments as capital projects, never mind the completely delusory claims of "clean-coal" (or CCS) technology - our rhetoric about Scotland as the "renewables powerhouse of Europe" will be more like greenwash than a Green New Deal.

I'm not hugely impressed with the Scottish Greens' contributions to our public debates - sometimes it seems they've been too infected with the testosteronal yah-boo that disfigures much debate in Holyrood. But we need a consistent left-green perspective on the independence question. Perhaps this is a discussion that movements and voices beyond the party system need to keep raising (as focussed by the excellent ideas-blog Bella Caledonia).

All that from one day with the Wednesday papers. As that old volcano once sputtered: "Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?"

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: As the Scottish professions get another kicking, when will the independence penny drop?

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - musing on the state of the Scottish bourgeoisie/professional classes, particularly as they are manifested in universities and journalism, and wondering what it takes for them to realise that the crises in their sectors won't get any better until they get a Scottish national parliament worthy of the name. Yes, rather unrepentantly independista this week... All comments welcome.

* * *

Two Scottish news stories yesterday spoke to the crisis and frustration of professional life in Scotland. A situation in which national institutions cannot realise their ethos or approach their ideals because of the macro-level structures limiting their development - whether that be Westminster, or an American media corporation.

Watching the Education Minister Mike Russell on the BBC's Democracy Live channel yesterday, contextualisng his Green Paper on higher education to the Holyrood Parliament, was to witness a rather classic combination of truculence and mastery-of-brief. Let your eyes film over, and you can see him in gaiters and periwig holding forth in an 18th century coffee-house, or perhaps in pith-helmet and wire spectacles lieutenanting some still-red section of the World Atlas.

By which I mean that Russell is as perfectly distilled an example of the ambitious and historic Scottish bourgeoisie as it is possible to inhale. Yet his grandiloquence overcompensates for the relative impotence that a devolved Scotland under Westminster possesses. 

The Green Paper was itself reminiscent of the Independence papers previously presented by Russell - fair-minded almost to a fault in arraying the arguments of the opposition, alongside the Government's preferred option of no tuition fees and full state funding of higher education. 

There's an almost touching commitment to the spirit of the Scottish Enlightenment expressed here - a belief that, fully informed, Scottish politicians of whatever party will come to some optimum policy position in the interests of the country. Throughout this administration, it's a tone I've enjoyed from ministers like Jim Mather, John Swinney, Fiona Hyslop, Russell himself and of course Alex Salmond, who for all his despatch-box swagger is still the most serious and thoughtful Scottish politician working today.

But whatever "Scottish Solution" emerges from the catallaxy of costing exercises - whatever range of consolidations and efficiences (though hopefully not student contributions) comes to pass - it won't be a solution to what is clearly the biggest Scottish Problem of all.

Which is that not enough macro-economic powers exist to allow for the proper expression of national priorities in this country - one of which would be to follow the lead of successful small nations like Finland and Norway, and nourish a super-smart population through free and state-supported access to quality higher education.

I'm an independence-supporter, though I'm trying with as much loving-kindness as possible not to be partisan about the prospect of a Labour-dominated minority government or coalition for four years after May 2011. But I see nothing but stasis for Holyrood if it's controlled by the Scottish Labour party, whose job will be to contain Caledonian disgruntlement and redirect it towards a Westminster victory at some point in the middle of the decade.

My hope for the next five months is that an election message can be fashioned for the SNP which lays out clearly how much they have managed to achieve, but just as clearly what could have been achieved with full nation-state powers. The 40 per cent of Scots who give independence credence, as noted in a recent poll, have to be at some point addressed, comprehensively and confidently. If four years of governmental experience cannot sharpen that argument to a razor's edge, what can?

But it's not just independence politicians in Scotland who are experiencing the frustrations of far-off rule. Yesterday brought news that the Herald, Sunday Herald and Evening Times papers were about to announce 14 more redundancies - after rounds of pagination and staff reductions that have already thinned out these papers to the edge of journalistic credibility.

There are other unconfirmed reports that the Sunday Herald newspaper - of which I was one of the founding editors in 1999, and which was recently recipient of a European Newspaper of the Year award - might be about to become a "news magazine" in early 2011, evidently trying to make a virtue of collapsing all sections into one.

It has to be stated clearly: if any of the Herald titles had existed under the non-stockmarket-listed Trust status that the Guardian and Observer titles enjoy, they would not be caught in their current death-spiral - reduced readerships, resulting in reduced editorial quality, resulting in further reduction of readership. 

Successive waves of merger and acquisition have combined with the usual punitive return-on-investment levels demanded by American corporate giants like Gannett. The consequent efficiency drives mean that the distinctive quality of Scottish national titles are gradually reduced to the cookie-cutter templates of regional and city news.

Of course, Scottish newspapers are no different from any other content industries being revolutionised by digitisation and networks. This very publication (at the end of your trackpad) is an enterprising attempt to bring the values of Scottish editorial to the open wilds of the free internet. And it's not as if there aren't successful examples of some of the oldest press titles figuring out how to bring revenue in from the digital generation.

The New York Times ran a piece last week on how The Atlantic magazine is now making a clear profit from a combination of news aggregation, website development, star columnists, departmental consolidation and branded "Atlantic" events - all of which generate a real slice of online ad revenue, allowing this serious publication to maintain its 150 year old tradition of "the organ of no party or clique".

It's troubling to see the confetti of trained, experienced and talented journalists raining down from traditional Scottish titles - itself a hollowing-out of another branch of the Scottish professional classes. But I trust that out of the chaos, some new associations of writers and investors will eventually figure out how to make decent editorial pay, from the traffic across various screens and devices.

It might be a shrunken business model, with journalists acting as orchestrators of citizen-journalists, and developing their specialisms into consultancy and other services. But if forty percent of Scots feel that independence is a desirable goal, the demand for news about the specific structures of Scottish society won't be going away too soon.

Yet it feels damnable that our oldest Scottish titles don't look like being capable of making the same turn-around as The Atlantic. A Scotland with full powers of media regulation would have had a lot to say (and do) about the various rapacious ownership structures that have brought titles like the Herald and Sunday Herald to their knees.

Another futile yearning for tinpot powers by self-interested nationalists, say the likes of Iain Grey? No, just a rather understandable demand by capable, resident Scots that the modern project of their nation is properly completed. The old Scottish bourgie-bourgie, but taking the next logical step.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Why Wikileaks should be an asset for the brand called democracy

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - thoughts on the Wikileaks controversy. A huge moment for net-activists everywhere, where the openness of the web as a structure meets the self-defined boundaries of state power. High stakes, no matter your assessment of Assange. All comments welcomed. [All research links are at the bottom of the piece, in extended entry, as well as hotlinked in the text]

* * *

For those of us who have marvelled (and sometimes quivered) at the truly revolutionary power of the internet, the current Wikileaks phenomenon is the point where all the hype and idealism hits the hard reality of global politics.

The stream of US diplomatic cables, managed into the public realm by respectable news organisations like the Guardian and the New York Times, has freaked the US establishment so much that it's shaken the network society like a rag-doll. They've not just brought cyber-brandnames like Amazon and Paypal to heel, but they've even put the squeeze on Visa and Mastercard, in their attempt to choke Assange's organisational windpipe.

Now the Wikileaks' founder is under arrest, we'll see whether the tentacles of American power extend even further into the extradition procedures of another sovereign state (ah, I think we know the answer to that one). But as the circus proceeds, and the adversaries line up on either side - defenders of diplomatic statecraft on one hand, anarchistic unravellers of state power on another - perhaps we can look at all this from another angle.

It's not just national governments who've had to respond to the Net's x-rays of transparency. Since the heydays of Naomi Klein's No Logo in 1999, brand-led corporate capitalism has been grappling with motivated activists who want to rub countervailing facts in the face of glowing public rhetoric.

And a decade later, it's clearly had an effect. Recent consumer surveys have found that only 9% of people trusted companies to act in their best interests (60% said "sometimes", and 31% said "never"). In the current context, three reasons are often cited. First, the financial crisis was the final act that confirmed consumer cynicism about the worth of corporate governance and the business sector in general.

Secondly, our mobile media allows us to filter our own information, untouched by the gatekeepers of traditional media. And lastly, the social web allows us to prioritise the opinions of our friends, family and peers over the thudding messages of top-down branding. 

In this environment, where information about the sharp-dealing or shady practices of a company are easily and speedily circulated, a new philosophy of marketing is emerging. Instead of pushing people into a preferred way of engaging with a product, companies are now beginning to share their problems (and solutions) with consumers.

Instead of promoting a product's worth, they try to propagate it, encouraging creative use (and even mis-use) of an "adaptive" brand. Instead of business being all about getting straight to the purchase, it should be about participation. In the words of the UK marketing company New Tradition, you "cement a connection with the consumer" through an open platform (like Facebook) "who may or may not purchase a product at a later date". 

Thirdly, branding shouldn't be about generating loyalty, but about associating your product with like-minded people, or intrinsically interesting ideas, that already have an existing and vibrant following.

It's easy to get a sense of the old days of business by watching any episode of Mad Men. Here you have a patriarchy of secretive, arrogant image-builders, unremittingly cynical about how they manage the gap between the aspirational images of advertising they pump out, and the sordid reality of poor products and corrupt business practice.

Now, what does that sound like? And how does that map over to our current clash between the world of nation-state diplomacy and statecraft, and the anarchistic information-idealism of Wikileaks and their allies? Pretty well, in many ways. The political classes of the developed West have been largely mistrusted for at least a decade now - and let's not forget our own local data-driven crisis, the Telegraph's drip-feed of information about MP's expenses.

The street-level disrespect of social media is never-ending, all-pervasive, democratically exhilarating. On a tiny level, I've particuarly enjoyed the website featuring four YouTube videos of Nick Clegg implacably opposing tuition fees before the UK General Election - "on a loop for ever and ever and ever", as the cheeky website owner says.

But as marketer Ian Thomas says, Wikileaks really raises the game here - expanding the ambition of this informational scrutiny from a national to a global level of governance, appropriate to where the real power of decision operates.

Yet what does this scrutiny reveal? There's been a storm of interpretation of what impact the cables so far released will have. Writers like John Naughton, Glenn Greenwald and Assange himself claim that out of the blizzard of material, we can now see that our leaders have always known that Afghanistan is a hopeless, corrupt, Vietnam-like quagmire - but that they cannot fully face their tax-paying, soldier-expending electorates with that fact.

Added to the Iraq disclosures of a few months ago, this is Wikileaks attempting to lay bare the infernal mechanisms of the "War on Terror". They regard themselves as a "fifth estate" practising what Assange calls "scientific journalism" - a data dump so comprehensive that it will spur the fourth estate to rise out of its investigative torpor and establishment collusion.

But beyond the bloodthirsty ravings of some members of the American establishment, there is another consistent take on Cablegate - which is that they show an American diplomatic service trying to do their best, as their post-Cold-War empire slowly declines. For them, as Neal Ascherson puts it, "preventing [nuclear] apocalypse has become more important than striving for world leadership... this is a diplomacy clearer about what it doesn't want than what it does". 

In the aftermath of all this, let's return to our brand discussion. If we think of Western statecraft and diplomacy as a brand now damaged and tarnished by the demystifications of info-activism - as the Nikes, Gaps and Shell Oils had been in the past - how should they respond?

For one thing, that intriguing netherworld - where politicians and diplomats conduct gentlemanly double-bluffs between the members of unaccountable power elites - will now never be the same. And if they think that any amount of new regulation, individual imprisonment, or coercion of networks will return them to the status quo ante, they are deluded. 

So perhaps they should listen to these clever brand marketers. Instead of pushing hard their right to conduct international double-speak in order to promote the nation's interests, maybe they should share out those same global problems with all those citizens who may want a voice in the process.

What's the geopolitical equivalent of the vibrant users' online forum, where all can go to explore, inquire and test out solutions? How can statecraft tap into the kinds of participative enthusiasm for peace-making, community-building and conflict-resolving that so many netizens already display? Gordon and Sarah Brown's new website lauds the activist network Avaaz as exactly this kind of endeavour. 

And as large brands now look towards associating the values of their product or service with authentic movements and social groups, perhaps there is a future concordat to be struck between Wikileaks-style organisations and their currently enraged American pursuers?

As Evgeny Morozov wrote in the Financial Times earlier this week, Assange's movement could become "either a new Red Brigades, or a new Transparency International...But handled correctly, the state that will benefit most from a nerdy network of 21st-century Che Guevaras, is America itself".

At the very least, we have an immediate branding glitch: Hilary Clinton was making speeches about the power of free information to create healthy societies only a few months ago, but is now squeezing the fibre-optics of the internet like the most enthusiastic Chinese firewall manager.

As Morozov says, better to harness the power of these hackers "as useful allies of the West as it seeks to husband democracy and support human rights" - that is, make them a complement of Western soft power or public diplomacy - than to martyr their main representative and thus radicalise his followers. 

The leaked US embassy cables themselves hardly show a steely American empire bent on world domination - more a faltering hegemon, resigned to world mitigation. A YouTube video of John F. Kennedy has been flying around the wiki-sphere. In it, JFK reminds his fellow citizens that the very First Amendment the Founders struck was to guarantee a free press, empowered to investigate and criticise the state. There's surely some grounds there for mutual understanding.

When the current idiocies die down, perhaps the cerebral Obama can channel his great Democratic forbear, and think his way through to a better accomodation with the Wikileakers - whose aim, as Assange has often said, is to make themselves unnecessary. Barack was, after all, Brand No. 1 for a while.

Minarets, meaning-makers and mafias: at the European Writers Parliament (part 2)

 

The second (and final) part of my report from the European Writers' Parliament in Istanbul. This report is also published as my Caledonian Mercury "Notes from Everywhere" column.

 

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As we queued for the morning's baklavas at the European Writers' Parliament in Istanbul, I nodded at my distinguished colleague's remarks. "Much of what is going on here is very international-literary-conference, PEN-protest standard. Statements are being made that could have been composed even before they turned up". Then he scuttled off for a bitter coffee.

 But I wasn't going to join in his lofty disdain. I was happy to be the ingenue here, in this intriguing crowd, trying to be on "receive" much more than "transmit". What I was beginning to sense was the sheer cultural heterogeneity of this place we call "Europe". But also the common predicaments - from political to economic to stylistic - that beset the European writer.

In our commission on "Literature in the Digital Age", what emerged was a picture of European writers as affected by the "digital divide" as any group in society - and perhaps more so, because of the explicit traditionalism on one side of the gulf. It was jaw-dropping to hear a minority of writers doggedly defend their right to love vellum paper, fountain pens, brutal old typewriters.

They praised how these ancient means of literary production compelled them to make important decisions about their prose: being unable to digitally cut-and-paste made their writing more urgent, raised the stakes. They demanded their right to solitude and concentration, to preserve the moment of witness, to be diligent crafters of language.

This was a transnational appeal, from Icelandics, Belgian-Lebanese, Germans, Muslim Turks. (The Macedonian poet mentioned tremulously in the last post actually delivered a lovely, subtle meditation on poetry as a "network of meaning"). But I couldn't get too exasperated with those who wanted to shut out the buzz and twitter of the interactive world in order to wrestle soulfully with their prose.

Though his science is debatable, the US tech critic Nick Carr has sounded a useful warning about how deep reading might be under neurological threat from the permanent flicker and twitter of social media. And in terms of deep writing, I was reminded of James Kelman's words that, compared to many other more collaborative and mediated art forms, "in prose fiction the freedom to 'work honestly' exists, although you may have to fight for it". It's a good question: How can digital networks support the writer's "freedom to work honestly"?

Perhaps one way would be to help the writer to work with no name at all. A charismatic young Turkish activist (who I won't name) talked about French radical newspapers during WWII, like JP Sartre and Alexander Camus' Combat, publishing material anonymously in order to evade the reach of Nazi authorities. In his view, modern Turkish society needed a lot more of this "resistance writing". He noted the Turkish state's tendency (as exemplified by Penal Code 301) to "surround the Prime Minister and his party with a legal wall in order to protect him... You cannot write 'Prime Minister' and 'traitor' in the same sentence - it's illegal."

In order to evade the regulators and establishment, he continued, Turkish writers should give up the idea of "copyright" altogether on the web - "a text with no names speaking for all names, for all of those whose speech is being censored or suppressed". Yet, as the very sharp William Wall from Ireland reminded us, we should suspect our cyber-idealism: the internet could all too easily become the ultimate means of social control, as much as it could be a platform for resistance writing. Not much engineering is required for every click, scroll, copy and paste - particularly in the age of cloud computing - to be centrally observed by the wrong forces.

The rest of us in the room (including myself) could be classed as digital-literary "reformists", rather than either "luddites" or "resisters". How do writers defend the democratic power of the open web, while also finding a way to get a revenue by exerting some kind of property ownership over their works? For musicians, this is decade-long argument - begun with Napster and Bit-Torrent and currently continuing with iTunes, Spotify and YouTube - which we're only beginning to draw to some kind of conclusion.

The message I tried to convey from my own sector was that it might be possible, with some combination of collective licensing, good software and usable hardware, to rebuild some kind of money-stream through new distribution channels like the Kindle, iPad or future tablets. But the lesson of the music business is that the price of a digital book has to be sensibly cheap, given the experience of a web generation used to downloading and streaming to their heart's content.

The e-book shouldn't try to rip-off the consumer in the same way as the CD did to the cassette-and-vinyl buyer of the past. We know that the immaterial nature of the object means that prices should fall - and so they will.

But the even more urgent lesson is that authors need to become as conscious of their power as digital "rights-holders" as musicians now are - and support digital platforms (similar to Tunecore and Bandcamp for musicians) which will enable them to trade their works directly with readers, rather than have a whole army of intermediaries and middle-men take their cut. Perhaps, I also tentatively suggested, authors should also find a more dynamic way to relate to their readers, using web-community tools to amplify the connections they make at readings, in-stores and festivals.

In a brilliant presentation (here's an earlier version), the Swedish writer Ola Larsmo proposed the "x plus 1" theory: "new media does exactly what the old did – plus one thing more... And if we apply the formula of x+1 to the book, we see that whatever wants to replace it must be able to do everything a book can, including standing around for a long while and remaining readable. Whatever wants to replace the book must, by necessity, look very much like – a book.

And with that, a few of us skulked off to plan a "United Writers" (in the spirit of United Artists), to help connect the author's voice to those "engineers and coders" - featured in Hari Kunzru's opening speech - who will shape the "space of literature". Watch this space, indeed.

Our final "Declaration of Istanbul" had a slightly rocky passage to completion - it was perhaps too faithful to the bloviating and theorising that you'd get from rooms full of national intellectuals. But once the objections had been raised and noted, the committee produced a reasonable statement that asserted a few crucial points.

 

Primarily, it opposed "the use of penal codes and laws to harass and intimidate writers, such as has happened in Turkey and elsewhere" (not as explicitly stated in the first draft). The importance of funding translation schemes came with a brand-new (and supremely ugly) chunk of jargon: "biblio-diversity". The declaration was endorsed almost unanimously - with only one Muslim writer complaining testily that he didn't regret in the slightest "making it difficult for Naipaul to come".

Two themes were on my mind as the Parliament wound down. One arose from my many conversations with writers from post-Communist states, all of whom exhibited a remarkable depth of cynicism and even despair about the public culture and political structures of their country. Bulgarians satirising their diplomats as venal idiots; Slovaks writing best-sellers on the human face of their mafia gangs; Latvians watching their language wither on the vine for lack of cultural investment; Hungarians terrified at the extreme right-wing elements in their polity...

Other than the perpetually optimistic Nordics, these writers were describing a Europe in a state of exhaustion and even nihilism - not a good mood for Europeans to be in. I found myself counting my blessings for the consistent temper of the Scottish national mood - no doubt benefitted by the relative development of our economic and public services, and the access to rich markets of our English-speaking cultural producers. By comparison with these countries, our minuet-like steps towards effective self-government, and the pettifogging squabbles about the relevant tactics in Holyrood, seem even more like the squandering of an easy and obvious opportunity.

And as for nationhood, I'm only beginning what feels like a long investigative journey into the nature of national identity in Turkey. Perry Anderson's powerful LRB essays on the history and legacy of Kemalism have two main points. Firstly, Turkey cannot become the geopolitical fulcrum between Europe and the Arab world that it craves to be, without fully reckoning with its darker history: the genocide against the Armenians, its many other ethnic and regional pogroms and exclusions, and its current deafness to the self-governing demands of Kurds within its borders (and Cypriots beyond).

Do Scots, as Tom Devine constantly reminds us, have to face up to the human costs of our eager facilitation of British colonial horror? Or Australians their treatment of aboriginals? Of course we, and they, do: any healthy national identity does, particularly those that once operated as Anderson's "party of order". Going by the voices of the Turkish writers at this gathering, there is a similar reckoning coming for the sons of Kemal.

Anderson's second, well-argued point is that Turkish secular nationalism was always much more coldly pragmatic about the use of religion to maintain social harmony (particularly via Sunni Islam) than its current advocates claim. Any morning read of Istanbul's two excellent English-language papers, Daily News & Economic Review and Zaman, is like staring into a clouded pool of coded messages and religious-political strategies it could take years to understand fully.

 

And yet, and yet. We closed our visit with a tour round two thrillingly beautiful mosques, the Haghia Sophia and the Sultanahmet (or Blue Mosque) - the latter in particular (see pix above) a mind-blowing orgy of geometric form, pattern and colour, its impact on the caverns of your head and heart undeniable.

The Istanbul skyline on that final evening looked unreal: a teeming social fabric cast upon its seven hills, the mosques surmounting this tumult like 50's sci-fi structures. Alongside my urbane companions, it felt like one of the few places on earth where some new discussions might occur - about how to reconcile progress and piety, modernity and tradition, the contingent and the eternal. I hope I'll be back, and in the meantime I'll certainly be listening and watching.

Visit the European Writers Parliament website. 

Write at the centre of everything: Attending the European Writers' Parliament, Istanbul (part 1)

Here is the first of my two reports (and there's probably a few pieces more to come) from my attendance at the European Writers' Parliament in Istanbul, 25-27 November, 2010. For me an extraordinary few days - bringing me into contact with a continent of writers and thinkers, and beginning a relationship with one of the most compelling cities I've ever visited (and one of the most fascinating national political cultures too). This piece is also published in my Caledonian Mercury column.

* * *

At the start, the suburbs of Istanbul whoosh by the coach window like Naples, or the outer boroughs of New York: it's all toothsome ad hoardings, mysterious blocks of industrial storage, lots of interpretive driving not worth thinking too much about.

And then, as the hills around the Bosporous begin to rise and dip, the living city comes into view - box-houses flecked with yellow windows, encrusted on the hills like domestic coral. And breaking up the pattern, with spotlights spilling up walls, minarets and domes, are huge mosques. Sitting at the top of each hill, they loom and recede in your perspective, following a natural order.

I've been attending the European Writers Parliament in Istanbul, over 25-27th November, 2010, as the Scottish representative. Just off the plane, I'd already met some fellow Writer-Parliamentarians: a clutch of Icelandic writers ebullient about their country's future. "We've identified the bad people, we have a new constitution, we're voting on it tomorrow. It's all quite dynamic!"

Among them is a homburg-hatted philosopher, who's working with Bjork on resisting the corporate take-over of Icelandic natural energy assets. We lightly compare the fate of small nations, and the relative utility of Kindles (they will be in my "Commission", titled "Literature in the Digital Era").

Eventually the Hilton International Istanbul lets us in, as we pass through two security checks and an airport scanner in the lobby. Again, this sets off some familiar city memories: the Europa Hotel in Dublin, in rock'n'roll most loved, and in terrorism most bombed; the Glasgow Hilton, which sits across from my beloved Mitchell Library like the defensible headquarters of some future coup.

 

Amid decor which combines Texan carvery with sultan's library, there are photo blow-ups of previous visitors - including the Queen, Muhammed Ali and Jackie Kennedy - to Conrad Hilton's first international hotel outside of America. (Why? Hilton was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor at the time, who was brought up in Istanbul). So if it was safe enough for the glitterati of the 50's and 60's - and where was Sinatra, incidentally? - it's safe enough for this group of pensive, variably-kempt shufflers. But where is the implicit threat coming from?

This recent bombing of the business district in Istanbul might make a temporary resident of a prestige building a little nervous (the suspects' list includes Kurdish rebels, Al-Qaida or some other faction in the swirl of Turkish politics). But we emerge from our power-showers the next morning to face a somewhat more literary rebellion. VS Naipaul, due to give a keynote speech to the delegates, has "by mutual agreement" withdrawn from the conference: a delegation of Muslim Turkish writers have objected to the great curmudgeon's disdain for political Islam and all its works.

If I've understood anything from my cribbing over the last few days on Turkish history, the very selection of Naipaul as speaker in the first place triggers instant debates around the importance of Turkish secularism. The very formation of Turkey, as a modern-nationalist project under Ataturk in 1923, is premised on a suppression of everyday, visible and audible Islam from the public sphere.

And Kemalism (the name for Turkish secularism) isn't just backed up by the usual layers of Enlightenment-wielding bookish intellectuals, but by the full force of the military establishment. This "deep state" recently threatened to conduct a "e-coup" in 2007 - the message was posted on an army website - because the wife of a prospective president was wearing an Islamic headscarf in public.

Above all this floats a familiar balloon of world-city ambition. Istanbul's current status as European City of Culture (an obvious component of Turkey's long and thwarted campaign to become a full member of the European Union), and its general fashionability among the Newsweek types, means this Writers' Parliament is clearly a prized part of a cosmopolitan branding strategy.

But if you're going to invite grumpy radicals like the UK novelist Hari Kunzru, Ireland's William Wall and myself into the room... well, they can hardly expect this to all go too smoothly. The Naipaul no-show is merely a lightning-rod for the contrarian, critical energy that's already crackling through the enormous convention room at the Hilton.

 

 And after one or two throat-clearing or majestically abstract speeches (I liked the idea from the veteran left-liberal Murat Belge that "the only ethos of writing should be infinite critique - this is the only control mechanism of the writer"), Hari Kunzru serves very well indeed as an alternative lightning-rod.

My first encounter with him is hilarious: we both greet each other in like media-wanker manner ("good to see you actually exist"), and it takes us about thirty minutes of motor-mouthing to situate ourselves in our respective cultural landscapes (Deleuze? Check. Kirsty Wark on Late Review? Check. Tales of postmodern drollery and criminal networks in three other continents? Check). After that, all is well, and I can settle back with my You-Tube-ready iPhone and happily record his plenary speech, given in lieu of Naipaul.

It's excellent. His first theme is "the space of literature", nowadays defined all around by information technology. Out of this space's main shapers - corporate bodies, adminstrators and engineers - writers should make common cause with the last of those (otherwise known as hackers). Yet what writers and coder-hackers should build together is not an easy objective to define.

Current information platforms can potentially send a writer's texts all over the world, able to gather new readers in the most surprising places. But they also release those texts from any kind of commercial relationship - easily evading any copyright laws, and freed from any solid paper object that could be sold. "In this world of sharing and infinite reproducibility", says Hari, "the value of our labor is being driven down. People want us to work for free. How are we to live, as writers? Should we even expect to live ‘from writing’?" Much discussion about e-books, neo-communism and United Writers later.

Hari's second main theme was around the consequences upon language of the war on terror, particularly the way that a "playful, creative" multiculturalism has become "increasingly used by cultural conservatives of all stripes to police cultural boundaries".

It's a delicate argument to conduct in the Turkish context - where, for example, the millions of Kurds who live in the country also reside in many of its national neighbours, and whose politics are articulated through both the most normal modes (their own national tv channel and media) and the most extreme (the PKK, a political movement that uses terrorism as a tactic). A country where a self-consciously "moderate Muslim" government finds itself in a delicate battle of position with secular-nationalists (backed by the generals) as to the "Islamicization" of daily life in Turkey.

 

So when Kunzru criticised the super-patriotic Turkish Penal Code 301, which makes it a crime to insult Turkey, the Turkish ethnicity, or Turkish government institutions, there is at least the virtue of something clear and incontrovertible to oppose, on freedom-of-speech grounds. The chief patriotic insult seems to be the description of the massacres and deportations of the Armenian people from the Ottoman empire after WW1 as a "genocide" (uttered by Pamuk, and our opening speaker Murat Belge).

But it gets tricky when Kunzru condemns "Enlightenment fundamentalists... puffing up their chests about the values of the Enlightenment, as a badge of their superiority against poor and marginalised immigrant populations". I'm not quite sure whether Kemalism, Turkey's mix of rationalism and nationalism, would see itself in that picture. 

Hari advocates instead a "genuine internationalism...asserting our common life across borders of race, class and religion". But doesn't that "internationalism of our common life" have some relationship to the Enlightenment - at least in its universalism, if not for its fundamentalism?

"A liberal politics of absolute inclusivity, while presenting itself as pragmatic, has the disadvantage of obscuring genuine differences and antagonisms", continued Kunzru. But such a liberal politics would have the advantage of being able to include and cope with VS Naipaul airing his "divergent views" in a tolerant, rational space of a Writers Parliament, rather than (as the Muslim writers were able to achieve) cancelling his visit on the grounds of "offence to Islam".

For all those quicksands, Hari's statement was a great way to start our journey across this almost impossibly varying European terrain of cultures, languages and nations.

And straightaway, you arrived in the most surprising of places. I wandered into our discussion room, and found myself sitting next to a graceful, modest woman with her head traditionally covered. Introducing herself as Cihan Aktas, I found out later that she had been in the forefront of objections to Naipaul's visit: "The disgust he feels for Muslims in his books is appalling", she was quoted in the Guardian, "I cannot attend the event given all of this."

But in the meantime, after listening to her reserved take on the relationship between the net and literature, I watched her pick up a copy of my book The Play Ethic, and rifle methodically through the bibliography. Before we started, Cihan passed me a scrap of paper with list of names. "You know these thinkers?" she asked. On the paper were the roll-call of the European philosophical far-left: Zizek, Ranciere, Badiou, Negri. "I'll mail you on your philosophical interests", she said firmly. "For my newspaper column".

Curiouser and curiouser. Meanwhile, the Macedonian poet in the corner was concentratedly marking a fistful of sheets, readying to deliver...

Visit the European Writers' Parliament website. 

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: How this 80's Scottish graduate completely understands current student anger

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - a small bite, driven by personal testimony, out of the enormous cherry that is the fate of Scottish universities under the Coalition's squeeze on Holyrood's budgets. Mapping the acute discomfort that arises from comparing my own 80's university experience, in all its freewheeling nature, with the anxiety and constraints of contemporary students. All comments, as usual, welcome. 

* * *

My four years at Glasgow University in the 80's - most of those years still crystal-clear in my head - forged who I am. And if I even briefly dwell on the economic and social conditions of that education, I can understand every iota of current student anger.

It wasn't unprecedented in my Coatbridge family for children to go to University - I had two mercurial aunts who were languages and business studies teachers - but there was enough pride to go round amongst my relatives when I finally made it. I got two A's in the Highers I loved - English and History - and two C's in the Highers that my generalist mentor at St. Ambrose, Mr. Dempsey, compelled me to do (Physics and Maths).

But those eight points levered me over the seven I needed to do English Lit and Language at Glasgow. No worries about tuition fees or graduate taxes - the reading lists felt like enough daily struggle - and there was even some strings-free grant money to get me from week to week. 

From 1981 to 1985, doing two years of the classic broad-based Scottish degree, and then specialising in English for two years till Honours, I had a compete intellectual ball. Yes, there were hormonal surges, identity crises (once involving a Socrates-style beard), occasional indulgences and a towering romance (generating a life-long friend and two children). Everything you'd expect from the playbook of the then-seminal sit-com The Young Ones.

But there was also a tumultuous journey through ideas, and the assembling of some basic mental tools of analysis and deep study, which couldn't have set me up better for my subsequent quarter-century of a career. For me, being at Glasgow was a magic combination: a measure of lifestyle openness - with time and space to set up Popular Culture Societies, or cut ones teeth as a pundit in the student newspaper, or cut out of lectures if you felt the need to - combined with a bounty of intellectual resources.

And this resource wasn't just the tower of Babel that was the University Library, where I experienced the web-search before it was invented, simply by drifting through the periodical stacks and letting my interests reign. It was also the one-on-one tutoring, and regular seminars, where you faced personalities and thought-styles that both challenged and supported you, allowed you intellectual ambition but not without rigour or research.

I could name many names, but I'd want to quote in particular Philip Hobsbaum and Diane MacDonnell in literary theory, or John Caughie in film and tv studies. Although I've always had a glib talent in punditry, they instilled in me a lifelong passion to understand the bigger conceptual frameworks that make sense of cultural and technological change.

And the thing is, they taught me. Not for them a sequestered pursuit of research ratings via specialised publication, with the grubby business of dealing with formative students held at arms length, or given to post-grads. I remember being close to the flywheel of these minds, not quite understanding all the sparks that flew off, but inspired enough to build my own engine. As I move through my current media-and-ideas career, I meet many people who, if you chance to mention an academic or teacher that's been important to them, will literally glow at the memory.

I can't say that I loved the many exams of my university experience - the current fashion for continuous assessment or substantial project work would have certainly suited me better. But I can honestly say that the eclecticism and mental agility that was the result of running around the intellectual playground of Glasgow University in the 80's, helped me out in those final crunch moments in the Bute examination hall: and in similar circumstances of deadline or constraint, they've helped me ever since. That experience of being a free and well-resourced intellect has been a reactor-core of career fuel for me. I'd wish it on anyone.

So the current upheavals in university education funding and structure, in the light of my own fulsome experience, pain me greatly. We all await the "distinctively Scottish" solution to a university funding crisis that a cruelly constrained SNP government has to stitch together, under the yoke of this appallingly destructive Westminster Coalition. (One legacy of my Glasgow University years was a conviction about independence which has not dimmed since - and this directly relates to the priority that an autonomous Scottish budget would make about core funding for universities).

At the very least, there has to be a distinction made against the kind of crass consumerism and utilitarianism that the Browne report is about to impose on English higher education - where all courses will be subject to "student consumer demands", and those that don't clearly deliver "marketplace advantage" will wither on the vine. Stefan Collini's recent article in the LRB does the most elegant demolition job on Browne. But he concludes with a statement which should ring all the way round Scotland as well:

What is at stake is whether universities in the future are to be thought of as having a public cultural role partly sustained by public support, or whether we move further towards redefining them in terms of a purely economistic calculation of value and a wholly individualist conception of ‘consumer satisfaction’.

We have to defend the 'universal' (or at Scots would say, generalist) core of the university experience - that time and space for making connections and constructions, comparisons and critiques, existing at some safe distance from a market-democratic world. Is this world the most perfect occupational landscape itself - institutionally, economically and environmentally - that it can make such constraining demands on the nature of the university? I hardly think so.

Under the limits of devolved environment, there may be tactical retreats to be made about certain details of student and university funding in Scotland. But these have to be regarded as temporary, not permanent - and particularly to the extent that they impose a dispiriting financial ceiling on the imaginations and ambitions of Scottish students, walking into a world which demands their full capacities and energies.

I received exactly that kind of transformative experience from my 80's years up on the hill in the West End of Glasgow. It feels completely unjust, when the challenges of the age are exponentially much greater than mine, to deprive current Scottish students of that moment of free development - which was always the great offer of Scottish education. Let students channel their anger well: from this member of an earlier, luckier generation, they have my full support.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Linda Norgrove & Shirley Manson - what these "wandering Scotswomen" can teach us about our diaspora

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - noting the conjunction in one morning's Scottish papers of two brilliant young women of the Scottish diaspora - joyously Shirley Manson from Garbage, and tragically Linda Norgrove's funeral in Lewis. Two wandering Scots, illustrating each side of the contradictions and paradoxes of Scottish diaspora. All comments welcomed.

***

Two daughters of the Scottish diaspora came home the other day, under very different clouds. Shining out of Wednesday's papers were the features of Shirley Manson, the Edinburgh born-and-forged lead singer of US indie titans Garbage, giving solid advice to music students in Paisley: "there's two things you have to accept in this industry - poverty, and a huge element of failure".

Elsewhere, a different measure of poverty and failure, but also a tear-inducing celebration of a life nobly lived: the Lewis funeral of the 36-year old aid worker Linda Norgrove, killed in the course of a raid in her kidnappers in Afghanistan. The moment was a beautifully mixter-maxter of elements - a humanist service, with the coffin passed along hundreds of mourners in best Hebridean tradition, under lowering grey skies.

Two emotionally-contrasting scenes of confident, globally-minded Scotswomen - one sparking the fires of creative aspiration to the very heights, the other kindling a flame of compassion and service in the most demanding of circumstances. The Scottish nationalist matriarch Winnie Ewing once coined the snappiest of slogans about the desire for nation-state independence: Stop the world - we want to get on.

True, I agree: I'll vote for that. But stories like these make you realise that we're already on the whirl, at least: the Scottish diaspora as a vast scattering of capable humans across the entrepots, trade routes and trouble-spots of this planet - a scattering that has been going on for many centuries, containing a multitude of dramas right across the human spectrum.

I've been thinking about the relations between homeland and global adventure as a result of a consulting gig I've just undertaken - an advisor with a new social network aimed at serving the Scottish diaspora in all its manifestations, called Kiltr.

Yes, the joke is double-edged: as well as being a Jockular version of what Facebook and LinkedIn are already doing, it's also a tool for balancing the various info-streams of contemporary living. But the question of what the diaspora actually means for Scotland, what kind of a resource it is for the nation, is a fascinating one, no matter the medium that services it.

In September the Scottish government outlined its Diaspora Engagement Plan, a robust document that delivered effective statistics ("20% of the Scottish-born population live outside of Scotland, and estimates put Scotland's international Diaspora population at around 40 million") and many useful categories (there are, apparently, six types of diaspora Scots: Reverse, Returning, New, Lived, Ancestral and Affinity).

There is a battery of networking initiatives already in place - some capitalising on the impact of the Homecoming and the prospect of the Commonwealth Games, some more business- and research-oriented. And there are also some hearth-warming ambitions for diaspora policy. They're aiming to return flows of capital - whether financial, intellectual or culture - from successful Scots around the world. But they also want to create a "community of mind", using the expected digital and convivial means, whereby an "idea" of the country can engage Scots-lovers (as well as Scots-born or -descended) in the fate of the nation going forward - what the document calls "reverse" and "affinity" Scots.

All very Panglossian, and with the orotund uplift of messrs Russell, Salmond and the rest of the SNP expertocracy resounding through it (which is not necessarily a bad thing). But in a search for more context, I asked the Holyrood office to send me a DVD of the Scottish Diaspora Forum held at the Parliament building in July 2009. 

By far the most interesting contribution was historian Tom Devine's keynote on the history of disapora - and particularly on the "intellectual honesty", rather than "myth and Romanticism" (as he put it), that should inform any such "community of the mind".

On the upside, the 800 year constancy of the Scottish disapora - a continuous outflow of capable chancers, fetching up everywhere in Europe but particularly in Poland - gives an explanation for the Scottish Enlightenment which doesn't just rely on the benefits of Union. Our long-standing trade in European ideas - indicated by the great medieval University of Paris having 19 Scots rectors since its founding - shows a deeper grounding.

On the downside, our most notable historic feature of diaspora has been what Devine called "men of violence" - the mercenaries much in demand during Europe's bloody 17th century wars, or the "ethnic garrison" of Presybterian Scots imported to Ulster in succeeding centuries.

And as he rightly pointed out, we have to reckon with the "very-difficult-to-imagine hegemony" of Glasgow over the Maryland and Virginia tobacco plantations, or of Scots throughout the Caribbean colonies and other outposts of empire and exploitation: a "darker impact" of diaspora that should not be mitigated. All those Scots names in the Jamaican phonebook, and not there by choice either.

Yet we can make a return to our two inspiring diaspora Scotswomen at the top by considering Devine's central point: his "paradox of Scottish emigration". Why does the record show that even when Scotland was the very height of modernity - the second richest nation on earth at the peak of Empire - our flows of emigration were as constant and enormous as they ever were?

The historian's answer lies in the sheer extremes of Scottish development. A lingering Reformation commitment to mass education and skilled trades, combined with the bitter economic hardship of many at the sharp end of industrial and agricultural revolutions, meant that many took flight to new lands - but armed with the confidence that their skills and talents could flourish.

Devine closed by suggesting that this weight of history might to some degree overdetermine the current global image of Scotland, obscuring the recent transformations of Scottish society: "the Scotland of 1950 is much closer to 1850 than it is to today... We need to demonstrate to the diaspora that, if many left the country because of negative forces, there's been a vast improvement".

Though Shirley Manson's training ground was more Miss Selfridge and punk clubs than Linda Norgrove's degree in environmental studies from Aberdeen University, both would seem to be driven by the "positive forces" fuelling Scottish disapora. They have used their modern upbringing in this developed, sophisticated country as a springboard for personal ambition - enabling a very familiar kind of Scottish wandering across the globe, but still with evident connections to the homeland (however happily or tragically expressed).

Part of a plan of to engage our diaspora would have to be the creation of platforms that curate such stories - sexy and cool, tragic and noble, and every other kind. These platforms would bring the grand ambitions of Scottish global progress down to the level of the everyday, the idealistic and the quixotic. And let's not forget, as Devine would remind us, that our military diaspora is still kicking its boots in the dusts of foreign lands. At the very least, these "global Scots" (and the question of their deployment, under what sovereign power) should not be excluded from the conversation.

If we steer our discussion about the diaspora by the lights of "intellectual honesty", it won't just be a cosy place, filled with the cultural consolations of clan and tartanry, or of indie and pop culture (the delightful musings gathered by the emigre website Dear Scotland). Amidst the joys of pleasant connection and mutual support that the modern world of communication affords, sparks will and should fly. To stay "on-kilter" implies a necessary dynamism in the first place.

Map of Thoughtland: James Hunter

Director of the Centre for History since its establishment in 2005. The author of eleven books about the Highlands and Islands, Jim Hunter has also been active in the public life of the area. In the mid-1980s, he became the first director of the Scottish Crofters Union, now the Scottish Crofting Foundation. Between 1998 and 2004 he was chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the north of Scotland’s development agency. In the course of a varied career, Jim Hunter has also been an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. He is presently a board member of Scottish Natural Heritage and chairs SNH’s Scientific Advisory Committee.

Jim Hunter’s first book, The Making of the Crofting Community, described by a contributor to Scottish Historical Review as ‘one of the most significant books of its generation’, has been in print for more than thirty years. His other books include A Dance Called America: The Scottish Highlands, the United States and Canada (1994), Last of the Free: A History of the Highlands and Islands (1999) and Scottish Exodus: Travels Among a Worldwide Clan (2005). Professor Hunter was made a CBE in 2001. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2007.

via www.history.uhi.ac.uk

One of the foremost "land" intellectuals in Scotland, who's also (as you can see above) gotten his hands dirty in public administration, and is now esconced at one of the most interested "networked" universities in Scotland, the University for the Highlands and Islands.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Hanging with the New Lefties as the Coalition's cuts fall

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury -finding myself downloading article after article from New Left Review, in order to arm myself for the coming 'age of austerity' being imposed by the Coalition government. Lots of links below to NLR - happy for it to be a bit of a puff for them, they deserve it... All comments welcome.

* * *

On the eve of the Coalition's Black Wednesday of deficit cuts, I was involved in what a psychologist would clearly call compensation activity. For about three hours on Tuesday night, I was downloading - perhaps hoarding is more precise - scores of digital documents from the archive of New Left Review over the 2000s. Am I worried I won't be able to afford the prescription next year? Possibly. Was I looking for signs that the calamities that bookended this decade - 9/11 and the Crash of 2008 - were part of deeper trends that the grandees of left thought had already identified? Certainly. Did I find those trends? Well, some of them. 

In a piece on globalisation in 2000, Frederic Jameson noted that "the only ‘religion’ or ‘religious tradition’ which does seem to show the energy of a resistance to globalization and Westernization (‘Westoxification’, the Iranians call it) is—predictably enough—Islam". The old anti-imperialist nationalisms weren't enough, said Jameson, to defend Middle-Eastern countries against exploitation of their natural resources. Some other equipment of protest would be required to "match the tremendous invasive force of the new, globalized capital".

And looking at long-term economic trends in the US, Robert Brenner wrote (also in 2000) that "the unprecedented ratio of household debt to household income and the fall of the savings rate below zero" made it difficult to see how credit "can continue to rise sufficiently to sustain consumption growth—and, therefore, how consumption growth can continue to drive the economy". 

Well, from the briefest of searches, not a bad score for the Marxists there. They seem to have anticipated Islamic terrorism's surprise attack on the icons of "globalized capital", and the underlying housing-debt-fuelled collapse of Western economies.

I turned to 2010's issues, to see if I could pick up any runes about the next ten years. Several articles on China are at pains to remind us of not just how epochal is its rise to economic superpower status, but its incompleteness. China's multinationals are weak by comparison with Western entities; the rural Chinese may well resist, for local and entrepreneurial reasons, their enlistment into the new industrial mega-cities; and how long can the Chinese Communist Party rely on "consumer nationalism" (as Perry Anderson puts it) to maintain their control and legitimacy?

Some pieces are counter-intuitive, usefully so. The veteran US leftist Mike Davis actually sees hope in the fact that a majority of people on this planet now live in urban environments. Cities that mark a clear line between town and country can encourage low-carbon living. On one side of the line, natural systems can be conserved and preserved; on the other, democratic forces can agitate for more efficient transport, housing and energy infrastructures. (Scottish supporters of Patrick Geddes and his garden city concepts might well be muttering: aye, we heard ye).

And the greatest of all left intellectual mandarins, Eric Hobsbaum, ends his contribution with this challenge. "The great question is this: historically, communities and social systems have aimed at stabilization and reproduction, creating mechanisms to keep at bay disturbing leaps into the unknown. Resistance to the imposition of change from outside is still a major factor in world politics today. How is it, then, that humans and societies structured to resist dynamic development come to terms with a mode of production whose essence is endless and unpredictable dynamic development?"

In short: everything solid is still being melted into air by capitalism. And if you're an SNP First Minister promising to protect your Celtic periphery from George Osborne's reckless measures, or the Maldives begging for carbon reduction before your land is submerged below the seas, you are still facing "the basic contradiction between the mechanisms bringing about change and those geared to resist it".

So fuelled and fortified by the very best of Soho socialism, I sat before my laptop yesterday and took in the flying axes of the Coalition's spending review. Certainly, many of the reductions in public departments, welfare and housing qualify for Hobsbawm's "disturbing leap into the unknown".

The huge cut in housing support, and the end of lifetime tenancy of council houses, introduces the cold steel of domestic turbulence into many poorer families who were hanging on in the best of times. A commitment that "wages are never exceeded by welfare" will mean a downward pressure on welfare, in an environment where wages are already depressed.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of forthcoming unemployed from the public sector have to hope in what Joseph Stiglitz (Alex Salmond's new economic advisor) calls the "confidence fairy" of private-sector revival to appear. According to Stiglitz, economic history shows that austerity measures in a slump rarely, if ever, create the "jobs boom" predicted by advocates.

Yet I have no doubt the Soho socialists are looking over the water at the French, fortified by their sense of civic republicanism and still organised by powerful trade unions, and are wondering whether the rather-more-battered masses of these islands would ever get involved in the same kind of action, to chasten their elites. After the convulsions of the Miners' Strike and the Poll Tax riots, and the huge non-event of the anti-Iraq War protests, has the public realm of British life has been mall-ified, community-policed and surveillance-camera'd into stunned quiescence? We'll see.

We seem to be the victims of the most extraordinary act of ideological hypnotism, though. We go through a banking crisis involving the worst kind of plutocratic excess and arrogance. The result? Not jail for some bankers, and a more bounded role for finance in general - but their debt rectified by the state, and the basic lifestyle and assumptions of the financial elite unchanged.

And instead, those who get punished are the pushed-around post-proletariat - those psychologically beached by the Thatcherite and Blair-Brownite consensus about the "weightless economy" and "the inevitability of global competition". And who now, at the behest of "the bond markets", have to submit to another increase in the micro-management of their deserving or undeserving behaviour, along with a real reduction in living standards.

If you live in NLR-land, you are compelled to be as interested in South-East Asia and the Latin American republics, as you are in what they called the "Blue Labour" of the Coalition government. Other than the SNP's exit strategy to a green, pleasant and independent land, there's little in the current British political continuum that taps into their great themes (the great Tom Nairn is Scotland's diplomat in their pages). And who knows what outlier from the wider regions of the world-system will land disruptively on our doorsteps?

But I guess they'd be looking at the current "contradictions" in this country, and really asking themselves: what does it take for resistance to happen? When do the people get angry? And what form will it take?

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: better an intellectual democracy for Scotland, than the inclusions & exclusions of a "Social Network"

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - a mash-up of thoughts about the new movie on the rise of Facebook, The Social Network, and the current crisis about the funding of Higher Education - begun by Lord Browne's English review, but reverberating throughout the Scottish sector (all links on this below). I'm trying to see beyond the "danger to elite university status" argument, by noting that not all US elite universities are the same... All comments welcomed.

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In real life and screen life, the headlines are all about the power of a university education. The new movie charting the founding and rise of Facebook, titled The Social Network, makes an audacious claim: that the 500 million users of a multi-billion dollar company are essentially aping the campus dynamics of elite institutions like Harvard University.

Over the border, Lord Browne's review of higher education in England makes a similar assertion about the transformative power of a university degree. In tight economic times (goes his argument), those who future careers will benefit from it should bear more of the burden of its current cost.

The Scottish dimension gives it all another twist. Deeply held national ideals about easy access to quality education - a tradition of "the democratic intellect" defended and amplified by the current Scottish Nationalist government - are being questioned by some University chiefs. They raise spectres of their institutions being toppled out of "world-class status" by rampantly-fee-raising English counterparts.

 It feels to me like we need to step out of the coils of the "deficit discourse" for a second, and allow ourselves to ask some more fundamental questions about what higher (and further) education means - as a personal experience, as an asset to society, as a model for how we should (or shouldn't) live.

The Facebook movie is an interesting place to start looking for answers. I saw a preview the other night; if you're a lover of The West Wing's stylish celebration of American power elites, you'll adore this movie.

But it's worth pausing to think about The Social Network as a cutting-edge environment for innovation. We see here the brutal intellectual and social competition within an Ivy League student body - where the smartest ones are sometimes the most self-consciously privileged ones too; where the cliqueyness and clubby behaviour of late teens and early adulthood becomes a concrete entry ticket (or barrier) into American career elites.

So the movie's makers Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher are claiming that this is the cultural soil in which a mass digital phenomenon like Facebook is formed. We are all poking and friending away with a culturally-shaped web-tool that enables us to become increasingly disciplined about how we rate each others' worth, and how we define in-groups and out-groups (indeed, the latest Facebook feature allows us to do that with even greater precision).

Come to think of it, there's been a lot of social media initiated by groups of friends on major American campuses with easy access to capital, whether from families or VCs (Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter). This movie invites you to ponder - and it's a question regularly posed - whether the relentless processes of inclusion, exclusion and meritocratic struggle that govern life on an elite campus is shaping our cyber-networks too.

Now for those university grandees in Neo-Scotia who clamour for the defence of "world-class status", I hope this gives them a moment's pause in their thundering. Because even within this elite range of institutions, different educational structures give rise to somewhat different kinds of world-beating innovation.

Just down the road in Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) does its bit to shape the internet as a democratic, open medium. Hacking - subverting technology till it breaks, so that better tech can be built - is actively encouraged. MIT Open Courseware puts its extraordinary richness of campus material online for free, useable by anyone in the world. The MIT MediaLab comes up with empowering technologies for the developing world, like One Laptop for Every Child (OLEC).

To top it all, the world's most famous intellectual Noam Chomsky still works and teaches there - in his very person an embodiment of ground-breaking research (as a linguist) and unbendable moral principle (as a writer and activist). And incidentally, a second-to-none admirer of the Scottish Enlightenment. 

Of course, with all kinds of state, military and corporate funds pouring in, MIT has the latitude to do all this. The Scotsman's Joan McAlpine makes the correct point that the macro-economics of American education are historically quite different. Yet if we embark on a much more privatised model here, how long would we have to wait before Scottish private endowments proportionately matched American levels - which we know helps those without means (or without much) to attend Harvard or MIT? What turbulence and uneveness would we inflict on students and institutions in the meantime?

But perhaps we need to have a more confident, risky debate about the kinds of world-class educational institutions we want in Scotland - their research interests, the enterprising nature of the students they produce, their ultimate contribution to the commonweal.

Can a sense of national priority about the smarts that Scotland needs in the future - which I argue regularly in this column must be about our shift towards a increasingly self-producing, low-carbon, high-satisfaction society - shape our decisions about the funding status of higher education?

Perhaps there's a link between the principle of free higher education, and the wider freedom of thought and action that might help us get out of one toxic socio-economic model, and into a better, more sustainable one. The US nerds might call it a "hacker ethic", but we might as well in Scotland call it what we've always called it - an "intellectual democracy".

Does that mean more modular pockets of "university-ness" strewn throughout Scottish society: distributed centres of teaching and research, responding to more local aspiration and diverse social, industrial and environmental demands (does our "virtual" National Theatre of Scotland suggest a structural template)?

Rejecting upfront fees, the Principal of Aberdeen University suggested the other day that one possible cost-saving might involve more cooperation between universities and with further education. Can we think innovatively about what the topic areas and agenda might be for those cooperations? Rather than follow the lead of university bosses, clearly pining for the kind of table-thumping authority that Harvard Principal Larry Summers shows in the Facebook film, perhaps we should have the confidence to evolve a different model of higher education?

We seem to have recently managed to set our own course towards a more creative and emergent primary/secondary education system, and away from the Gradgrinds, in the Curriculum for Excellence (and that's another contentious column to come). The "game-changers" we value these days always have to be semi-autistic, atomised nerds, tilting resentfully against their nearest out-groups. Why can't a small, smart, conversational nation (and one which certainly does not reject digital tools) also turn on a dime?

Maybe an "intellectual democracy" is a better model for collective progress than a "social network". But let's not wait for Hollywood to anoint it on the big screen. 

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Scottish independence means building green-tech, not warships, on the Clyde

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - pegged to the sight of Scottish politicians of all stripes coming together to preserve the right for Clydeside shipyards to build weapons of mid-range destruction. Does the military-industrial complex impose a ceiling on the Scottish political imagination? As ever, keen to hear your comments below

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It's a song that, once sung, changes the way you think. Elvis Costello's Shipbuilding - particularly in the mournful version by Robert Wyatt that became a hit at the height of the Falklands War in 1982 - is about as perfect a lament against the military-industrial complex as you can get. 

The end-rhymes are brilliant and merciless: "Somebody said that someone got filled in / For saying that people get killed in / The result of this shipbuilding". And the closing words always, always, catch the throat: "Diving for dear life / When we should be diving for pearls".

I've been watching the all-party political spectacle in Scotland, lining up to make the case that two aircraft carriers planned for Clydeside shipyards should survive Westminster's Military Spending Review. And of course, as I sift through the arguments, I can't get the tune out of my head.

The integrity of the Green MSP Patrick Harvie has to be noted, the only leading politician willing to state what must represent a significant chunk of Scottish opinion: "We believe that the future for the engineering jobs involved depends on moving away from a reliance on vast amounts of military spending". That's one of my preference votes secured for next May, Mr. Harvie.

And Lesley Riddoch wrote a very well informed column in the Scotsman a few days ago, pointing out that Norway's long history of energy engineering - undistorted by an involvement in supporting British military prowess - has given it a huge industrial head-start in the renewables sector... even though Scotland owns most of the natural resources.

I can't look at Alex Salmond - both an explicit champion of green-tech progress in Scotland, and a consistent voter against Westminster war-adventurism - and not imagine his internal writhing at the moment. Find some way to retain the marine-engineering skill-set on the Clyde for the coming revolution: why lose the chance to beat these swords into ploughshares, reaping nature's new harvest? But as Riddoch points out, if our advanced engineering sector stays on a military drip-feed from the British state's middling-power ambitions, we won't have the flexibility to respond to the coming eco-opportunities.

I passed through Bishopton the other day, observing the BAE Systems logo blare from the tops of dockside buildings. Watching this particularly amoral bunch of death-dealers - in whom Norway's futures fund refuses to invest, for moral reasons - having their tummies tickled by left Scottish politicians... Well, the Costello song inside me goes up to full volume.

There are many of us for whom Scottish independence will be, among other things, the solid basis of a benign, creative nation - and a final discarding of the blood-soaked apron of Imperial Britishness. (After, of course, much soiled participation in it. What else is the Black Watch theatre-cult other than a therapeutic soothing of this collective wound, literal and actual, in the Scottish psyche?).

So it is peculiarly painful to watch an SNP leader pirouette (as he did recently about Faslane's right to provide maintenance to Trident) between the eternal nudge-fudge of devolution, and the clarity of nation-statehood - where we will at least get the chance to debate what kind and level of violence this state has a monopoly over.

But even in that debate about the military posture of an independent Scotland, I find myself dishearteningly at odds with old comrades, even heroes. Jim Sillars' recent pamphlet on independence asks the nationalist movement to grow up and start "thinking like a state", rather than being happy toddling around in George Robertson's "playpen" of devolution.

And part of that realpolitik for Jim now consists in retaining Trident in Faslane for an unspecified period of time after independence, in order to pragmatically assist the Westminster government in its exploration of alternatives. (Like Guantanamo Bay?) All the alarm bells go off on that one, ringing similarly with calls for "fiscal autonomy" or "devolution max" that leave defence matters in the hands of the UK goverment. If we can't exert sovereignty in order to demilitarise and denuclearise this country, really, what's the point of it?

Some of the cobwebs and skeletons in our national imagination really have to be cleared out, or repurposed, if we are to embrace the future properly. A clear "post-military engineering dividend" for an independent Scotland, where full macro-political powers are exerted to redirect ingenuity, sciences and industries in a green- and bio-tech direction, has to be part of the argument leading up to next May. And imagination, the energy and ability to think in new frameworks, is key.

I was listening to a podcast this week by the economist Carlota Perez, who in contrast to many perceives that our financial crash might herald a new global Golden Age of productive prosperity. She's a follower and developer of Schumpeter's theories of creative destruction: for her, recent economic history is all about finance driving the spread of new productive techniques, with the crash a financial inevitability.

But it's the state's strong regulations of the crash's aftermath - for example, the establishment of a welfare state after the booms, busts and wars of the first half of the twentieth century, for example - that helps to consolidate and spread the benefits of these new powers.

Green-tech provides the basis for this next Golden Age, says Perez. A highly-regulated mandate towards low-carbon outputs in itself will be a huge spur to innovation, techniques and services. But the lifestyle revolution will also move in the direction of new kinds of economic activity, rather than less.

Design heading towards durable, repairable objects; sociable, convivial experiences being more economically valuable than an isolated investment in status goods. An idea of plenitude that redefines "wealth" and "prosperity" as chosen activities, and time-for-community.

In many corners and scenes around this country, we can begin to taste such a future for Scotland. And to be fair, the aim of defining Scottish identity as a pursuit of sustainable wellbeing has been continuous through all the political administrations in the Scottish Parliament since 1999. To make sustainable wellbeing a justification for state power has to be worth the candle - Perez is adamant about the necessary role for state intervention and direction here.

But there's a terrible, metallic flavour on our collective tongue, a dark leaky filling: and that is our continuing entanglement in a British (and international) military-industrial complex which is a waste - both economic and moral - of our precious human capital. Scotland needs to step down from its black watch, and march vigorously towards the green-fringed daylight.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: why the Brothers Miliband are (and are not) like a feuding rock band

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury – some musing, from a personal angle, on the dangers and wonders of working with your brother on a common project, looking at how Ed and David Miliband might (or might not) reconcile their talents, after the former's victory in the Labour leadership race. All comments, as usual, most welcomed.  

 

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I've been watching the Millibandery of the Labour Party leadership battle with more than ideological interest. The dynamics of working with your brother is something I'm very much aware of, having done so with my own brother Gregory over the last quarter of a century, as one half of Hue And Cry.

But apart from the rollercoaster psychology of it all, there's something about how the Miliband brothers have conducted themselves that has wider implications for how we think about how politics is done, and should be done.

The C4 documentary Miliband of Brothers showed that the boys lived and breathed politics from the breakfast table onwards, under the gentle patriarchy of their Marxist father, Ralph Miliband. There's a poignant moment when the father pokes his head round one of their bedroom doors and expresses pained despair at them joining "New... Labour!"

That neither of these comfortably raised Islington sociocrats would echo their father's exile-driven ultra-leftism (as Tom Devine told me the other week, Ralph's real first name was "Adolph") is no surprise. But due to the necessary differentiations that siblings have to make among themselves, we should also expect that two political brothers would make distinct variations on their common theme.

The intriguing question is: after the younger triumphing over the older for a mutually coveted prize, how will they both handle the new power balance between them?

From my own experience of creative partnership with a sibling - which seems to have been a lot more stormy than the Milibands - you have to eventually realise that you each have your own domain of expertise. The main job of the partnership is to support the other in mastering that expertise, all aimed at serving the commonly-agreed goal. For too much of our early period in Hue And Cry, Greg and I were involved in a power-struggle for dominance: who was the real music leader here?

It got a lot easier for me when I realised that, while we write the songs together, Greg's production and arrangement talent reigns supreme. I should focus on being the best singer I can be, and take a holistic view near the end of a recording process, than try to micro-manage decisions that I'm frankly not expert enough to do.

Let's push this analogy tentatively (and as much for fun as anything else). What may be the problem for the Milibands is that both are equally qualified - both can be, as it were, lead singer and keyboard player combined. Both practised their political riffs at an early stage by taking a Politics, Philosophy and Economics degree at the same Oxford college. Both set out on separate but conventional paths of political advice and policy development within New Labour, (the elder allied to Blair, the younger to Brown). Both ended up with significant Minstries (whether diplomacy or environment).

So yes, the Milibands were always in the same group. The leadership contest for them was more like a duo that's temporarily "taking a rest" - the problem being that each had their own own solo album out, and both of them were contending for the same top music prize. (Maybe Ed's record is more scratchy-indie, and David's is more orchestras and session-players). The question is, now that the younger one has won the Mercurys, with all the evident status and power that confers, will the older one want to join the old outfit again? Or will he prefer to follow his own creative path?

Risible analogies aside, there's one strong reason to want them to resolve their own psycho-drama (no matter that David M refutes that there is one: believe me, there's always psycho-drama when brothers work together). During their campaigns, they both cast up visions of a gentler kind of male leadership that has real consequences for policy.

The elder proposed that at least one Cabinet post could be a parental job-share - clearly aimed at Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper who have a young family, but intended to set an example to work-life balancing throughout the organisations of these islands. David M's "Movement for Change", embracing faith and community groups like London Citizens, brought a noticeably different, less aggressive tone to Labour activism - something his brother has praised in the last few days (along with the Caledonian Mercury!).

And Ed Miliband's appeal to the "squeezed middle" of British families - for whom the cycle of mortgage-overwork-overdebtedness-consumerism is clearly undermining their quality of life - should be able to open up a solid critique of the Coalition's cuts as increasing their insecurity even more.

But changing the vocabulary and metaphors in which a social-democratic politics can be voiced is a crucial task for the Labour Party (and something their now-triumphant Compass grouping will be pushing for). In Scotland, the SNP have always been able to cushion their centre-leftism in the language of Scottish patriotism and nationhood. This has its own automatic and worthwhile emotional appeal (the Scottish variant is certainly more robust than Gordon Brown's weird Ukanianism), as long as it's handled with dignity and care.

From within the political village - where loathsome creatures like Andrew Neil get to orchestrate the media debate - it's easy to sneer and recoil at the protestations of brotherly love that the Milibands are making (and will make) to each other, no matter their own eventual political arrangements. But we should realise just how powerful this language of love and connection might actually be. The early Cameron, and his Saatchi-trained marketing advisors, knew this well – and tellingly, in yesterday’s speech, Ed M also brought the L-word into his vision of the “good” (as opposed to the “big”) society.

If tied to a left politics that genuinely addresses our anxieties about the state of our relationships - personal, familial, communal, maybe even global - and what structures can help sustain and improve them, the "new generation" of Labour might use their time in opposition well.

But if anything's required in the midst of general chaos - the music business and the politics business at least share that - it's strong, mutually supportive and ultimately unconditional relationships. It'll be a shame if the Milibands can't work it out. I can personally testify that it's a great background for common endeavour when it does.

Pat Kane's Cal Merc column: Where will Creative Scotland strike the balance between subsidy and commerciality?

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury – on rising discontent about the overall direction of the new giant public body for arts and media in Scotland, Creative Scotland. As ever keen to hear your comments. 

 

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There's one immediate thing that can be said about the rising flurries of concern about the operations of Creative Scotland, the successor to the Scottish Arts Council: it's two cheers and a bar of tablet for the burgeoning Scottish blogosphere.

The veteran media-man Kenneth Roy's Scottish Review - an online magazine of robust older curmudgeons, for which the word 'carnaptious' was minted - broke a story based on an e-mail from the new director, Andrew Dixon. The message to an unsuccessful grant applicant claimed that "we will not be a funding body in the old sense of the Arts Council but a strategic body".

Cue general alarum from the 50 or so outfits, and who knows how many individual artists, currently receiving "funding". Green MSP Robin Harper tabled a critical motion in the Parliament, Dixon responded to both him and Roy, and now we're in the midst of a proper digital exegesis - weighing jargon for nuance, waiting for the next covertly forwarded e-bombshell.

But underneath the flyting browsers, there are some fascinating issues to explore around the distinction between a "funding" and a "strategic" arts council. In answering Roy's charges that the secret agenda of the new Creative Scotland is "the privatisation of the arts", its head Andrew Dixon says:

We intend to promote cultural exchanges between this country and the rest of the world and to ensure that the country's creative professionals can profit from their talent. That is not 'privatisation'; it is about valuing the skills and ideas of talented people and protecting their intellectual property.

From a commercial perspective in the arts and media - which is where I've been for all of my creative life - the underlying meaning of this is familiar. Creative Scotland begins to sound more like a record company, book publisher or maybe even venture capitalist. "Ensuring that creative professionals can profit from their talent" doesn't imply the old idea of giving a grant to an artist so they can clear the time in their lives to be creative, with outcomes expected but not prescribed, and with the ownership of the object staying with the artist to deploy as they wish.

No, this sounds more like what Silicon Valley VCs like Tom Perkins call "managing the risk of their investment" in a project - which is, indeed, much more about "strategy" than "funding". I've had quite a few music-biz moguls over the years face me and talk about "valuing the skills and ideas of your talent" and "protecting your intellectual property". And in the course of protecting their "investment" - another code word in Dixon's discourses - they demand a cut of the overall royalty of the intellectual property of the artworks you produce.

I'm so used to this arrangement from my own commercial creative career that it always surprises me that it doesn't operate in the traditional arts sector. I would also imagine that what haunts the new Creative Scotland is the J.K. Rowling scenario. A few thousand pounds from the Scottish Arts Council is granted to a near-starving artist to help her complete her children's novel. The book becomes of the biggest multimedia cultural franchises of the last 20 years - and no scrap of royalty returns to the organisation that played a foundational role in making it possible. Does that feel right?

But there are many subtle dimensions to the relationship between markets, property, subsidy and the autonomy of the artist. Until recently, I've been able to say that I've never taken a penny from public arts subsidy - and then I was given a few thousands pounds to be a judge, in 2009 and 2010, for the Scottish Books of the Year. Apart from it being some of the best adult fun I've ever had with my clothes on, it provided an overview of just how widely, and sensitively, the old Scottish Arts Council supported the continuing dynamism of Scottish literature.

The novel category winner this year, John Aberdein's Strip the Willow, bore its SAC-funded symbol proudly, was published by a successful Scottish commercial publisher (Polygon, enjoying the fruits of Alexander McCall Smith's success, but long the recipient of SAC grants and funds), with Aberdein receiving a £5000 prize from the sponsors Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust.

On a dreamy day in Melrose, the tensions between inveterate lefties like Aberdein being in "strategic partnership" with a perhaps-not-so-financially-innovative old Scottish bank seemed less acute than usual. And being a witness to the previous year's overall winner James Kelman, a sheet or two to the wind, railing away at the SMIT head honcho about some Chomskyian matter - and said honcho maintaining a grave, head-nodding dignity throughout the dinner - is one of my take-it-to-the-grave moments.

 But I don't want to give the impression that there's some inevitable happy spot to be found between artistic autonomy and more commercially aware public arts bodies: there isn't, and shouldn't be. The outgoing SAC head, Richard Holloway, left the new body with a tract on 'creative disloyalty', hoping that artists would consistently bite the state hand that fed them. One look at the SAC-funded arts journal Variant, which devotes large stretches of its editorial to detailed critiques of arts-funding policy, demonstrates that this tendency won't be going away any time soon.

I don't go to see contemporary art, for example, hoping that it's going to be "customer-sensitive" - I want it to be customer-insensitive, to rattle and shock me into the new. The right of pure artists to maintain a creative distance from their funders must be maintained. In the overall balance of arts, even a commercial artist like me wants to be able to turn up to a space that hasn't been squeezed through the sausage grinder of formats and markets.

However much Creative Scotland wants to develop its role as a rights-sharing venture capitalist - and there may be some small scope for exploration there, either actively or as a broker - they must still recognise their ultimate function: as the organisation that allows creative imaginations to lift free from the usual pressure of consumer or investor expectations.

Scriveners and giggers like myself need those intense visions in our lives, available publicly and at no or low cost. And that's about an 'intellectual commons', not intellectual property - an ecology of creativity, not just a competitive market. Take that from a long-term hack.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: an altered boy looks quizzically at the Pope's visit to Scotland

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury – thinking about Catholic identity (the residuum of my own, and the state of Catholicism in Scotland), as Pope Benedict hits Scotland. Much amateur and self-therapeutic theologising, for which only a few apologies.

FOR A Coatbridge boy, and now a sub-cosmopolitan man, Pope Benedict's visit has raised a small storm of memory, politics and ethics in my heaving breast.

It begins with that slightly too lurid television footage from 1982 - even the video equipment was Thatcherite then - and my undergraduate indifference to the busy preparations my family and community were making for Karol's visit. This was doubtless driven by denial. Only a few years before I'd been an altar-boy, scripture reader and even thespian in the Christmas passion play, slap bang between the priests and in front of the Sacrament.

But even then, I'd have to say that it was the bling, spectacle and mystic poetry of Catholicism that was attracting me (preparation for a future career in media and song? I wouldn't deny it). Locked in my bedroom with Asimov and copies of 2000AD, I'd already managed to resist various quiet parental entreaties as to whether I had "a calling" or not.

But the thread of actual faith had snapped in the midst of a gruelling set of exams. Was it the assistance of a greater power, or an Tippex-splattered all-nighter, that was really going to get me through my Higher Physics? And as I later pronounced in the student bar, the last thing I was going to be participating in was some "ethno-religious collective fervour".

Of course I understood, from sternly delivered parents' tales and old newspaper job clippings of "Protestants need only apply", that Pope John Paul II's visit symbolised the full mainstreaming of the Irish immigrant community, and its faith, in Scotland. But I was reading Jurgen Habermas and Terry Eagleton now: I was way beyond all that hail-hail, embroidered-robe stuff.

A heavy moment of intellectual irony: as the years went by, both of those leftist radical thinkers turned out to be completely obsessed with religion. In 2005, Habermas conducted a series of dialogues with the then Cardinal Ratzinger, about the necessity of religious thinking - the equality of all in the eyes of God - to our notion of universal human rights.

And Eagleton, a Marxist who has always had a tortured relationship to Catholicism, took the image of the broken Christ on the cross away from the sexual-masochistic weirdness I'd so glibly attributed to it. Here, said Terry - in a to-do with Richard Dawkins - was a symbol of state torture and repression, at the very heart of a religion:

The Christian faith holds that those who are able to look on the crucifixion and live, to accept that the traumatic truth of human history is a tortured body, might just have a chance of new life – but only by virtue of an unimaginable transformation in our currently dire condition. This is known as the resurrection... this dreadful image of a mutilated innocent as the truth of history.

Whether that's quite what the infinitely forgiving Mel Gibson had in mind when he made his gore-fest version of The Passion a few years ago is debatable. But I've heard this revolutionary case, and for Catholicism in particular, put to me before.

The composer James Macmillan, in the late 90's, once earnestly said to me, in a Fransciscan sacristy in Glasgow, that "now socialism is fallen and discredited, there are some of us who believe that Catholicism is the only force left that can stand up to capitalism". Time passes, Macmillan now votes Tory, but some things never change.

I picked up the Scottish Catholic Observer this week, to find Macmillan defending the right of "Faithful Catholics" (his capital F) to believe in the "infallibility of the Church". Having read Geoffrey Robinson QC's pitiless demolition of the Catholic hierarchy's behaviour over the cover-up of priestly child abuse - and its roots in the sovereign power of the Vatican - Macmillan's frank veneration of the power of Rome is difficult to cope with.

One visit to St. Peter's (whose interiors are surely the template for the corporate display of power throughout the ages), is enough to drive you back to that wishful Anthony Quinn movie, The Shoes of the Fisherman - the one where he plays a Ukranian Pope who gives the riches of the church to a famine-stricken world. Yet as Robinson says, if Catholic aid comes tied with anti-abortion, anti-gay and anti-contraceptive advice, doesn't it unravel its own emancipatory purpose?

On behalf of BBC2's Review Show this Friday night, I'm hoping to report on Pope Benedict's visit to Bellahouston Park. As I survey the tens of thousands of believers, I'm going to keep in mind the respectfulness towards faith and sacred ritual that advancing Islam has demanded of many secularist and atheists (well, at least this one).

One back-woods pastor threatening to burn a Koran causes Presidents to respond and Arab streets to rise. With the "turn to tradition" visible in the Bellahouston celebration - stretches in Latin, Gregorian chant, et al - one can see a Catholic leadership yearning for that kind of militant piety.

I get religion. I understand the desire to put a limit to change and hyper-modernity, to give the eternal human realities of birth, death, love and suffering their symbolic due. (Didn't Graham Linehan's Father Ted turn this embraced cultural conservatism into the most sublime comedy?) And I know this particular religion pretty well, from the depths of my infant hymn-singing brain to the tips of my theology-website-dabbling fingers.

The best hope for fallen, scientific-materialist types like me is a serious and diverse dialogue with the giant, troubled planet of Catholicism. Secularists have their own centre of gravity: and of course, a mutual orbit is better than a war of the worlds. The Pope's visit deserves its huge attention. But this altered boy observes the show from a clear and critical distance.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: "Scottish independence as the route to growth". But what kind of growth?

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - observing the shift towards the economics of independence as the SNP campaign message coming up to the Holyrood elections this coming May. And wondering whether the race for "growth" is the most credible campaigning issue

THERE has been the usual soul-shrivelling yah-boo around the SNP's postponement of its independence referendum. Salmond tarring the "Unionist" parties as anti-democratic wreckers, Iain Gray minting one liners like "from flagship policy to white-flag". And for many of those citizens still listening, probably a pox on all houses.

But for those of us who profess a secular and progressive interest in independence, it's still worth unearthing some of the policy keywords that are already poking out of the stramash. And one of them is "growth".

"We've got part of the answer to facing up to this public spending crisis", said Salmond the other day, "and that answer is to get the financial powers into this parliament in order to deal with generating more growth, more revenue, and getting things done". Looking back on the 2009 National Conversation documents around fiscal autonomy - which still seem excessively generous in their Socratic inclusion of almost every other fiscal option - the SNP have a few core arguments about the connection between growth and independence.

One is based on appropriateness. Taxation and spending could be targeted to Scottish priorities. Say, a green tech sector exploiting our natural renewable resources, rather than nuclear power. Or the accelerated inclusion of Scotland's post-industrial poor in the social and economic mainstream, rather than just managing and policing them.

There's a fuzzier argument about efficiency: somehow, just by possessing full responsibility for tax-raising and expenditure, ministers will make more growth-oriented decisions about the economy. I saw a recent intervention from the economist on Andrew Hughes-Hallett on this, where he noted that

Navarra and the Basque country in Spain have fiscal responsibility; the other regions do not. Unemployment, although rising, is now only half that elsewhere in Spain. Income per head is higher than the Spanish average: 29.3 per cent higher (Navarra) and 34.2 per cent higher (Basques). Nothing has changed in the intervening 14 years except the fiscal responsibility which those regions have achieved

Yet how, exactly, did this come about? In another document, Hallett admits the research show an "ambiguous relationship between fiscal decentralisation and improved economic growth". Both Hallett and the Conversation paper see the ability to vary corporation tax rates as crucial to growth: Hallett notes that every time they've been lowered at the UK level, tax revenues have gone up.

So with the memory of Alex's previous pre-Crash embrace of "financial innovation" fading fast, expect to hear him and his front bench unleash the "open-to-business" Celtic Lion again, in the coming election rhetoric.

But is economic "growth" such an obvious target for independence? It depends on how we're defining growth itself. The weekend also saw a leaked report from the Scottish government's environmental commission, which promised what was described as an "all-out war" on car usage, on the way to meeting their own 42% carbon reduction targets by 2040.

Amidst the Jeremy-Clarkson-enraging measures, the glimmer of a different, low-carbon Scottish lifestyle emerges. A country where individuals rebuild their local ties through car-pooling; where bicycling increases in our cities from the current 2% to the 22% and more occuring in major European capitals; and where health costs decrease due to rising levels of overall fitness.

The independistas and fiscal autonomists say this kind of aspiration requires new Holyrood powers of social investment to get us there - particularly if we want a public transport system adequate and integrated enough to serve our mobility needs.

But it seems to me there are two clashing visions here of how an autonomous Scottish economy should be managed. One that believes we need low-tax regimes to let native, Hayek-style catallaxies of enterprise bubble up from below, generally heedless of their polluting impact (as I said in last week's column, it's not as if Scotland isn't already replete with companies enabling everything from Arctic oil drilling to Chinese nuclear reactors).

The other vision is confident about regulating markets and social activity to contribute to the planetary bottom-line. But its advocates can never seem to make the tangible and meaningful benefits of a sustainable livelihood shine through all the regulation and micro-level behaviour-changing.

So how do we connect entrepreneurial vigour and environmental responsibility in Scotland? How do we ensure that fiscal autonomy doesn't just unleash our latent merchant class, but guides their animal spirits to sustainable ends?

I was talking with a headhunter friend the other day, who deals regularly with venture capitalists, angel investors and start-ups in Scotland. Yes, he confirmed, "these are all go-getting, thrusting guys" (note the gender) "who want to blast their way into the marketplace. But I'm not sure whether the carbon-impact of what they're doing is uppermost in their minds".

You can't say that the SNP administration hasn't tried, within its powers, to forge the culture of that green enterprise economy. But as the Boston academic Juliet Schor says in her brilliant new book on sustainable economics, Plenitude, we can't just rely on hi-tech fixes to square the circle on growth and sustainablity: lifestyle changes will be needed.

One of her arguments (very much shaped by US values and norms) is that we need to change our vocabulary about "wealth". If we complex, desire-driven humans want abundance, could we come to regard time, community and personal creativity as our sources of "plenitude", rather than buy-'em-and-chuck-'em consumer goods? And what are the enterprise possibilities for the kinds of localised production that would open up if we took some daring steps on, say, our working week?

As they're saying about Obama at the moment in the US podcasts, "he's tried policy, now he's going to try politics" as he comes up to his own electoral test. So it's at least invigorating to hear that the economics of independence, rather than their competence as managers of devolution, will be at the core of the SNP campaign for the next Holyrood elections. But I wonder whether the debate will raise above the parameters of what Schor calls the "business-as-usual" economy.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Edinburgh, City of Protestors, Unrepentant Bankers & Wandering Braniacs

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury – reflections on a week spent with the contradictions of Edinburgh in Festival. All comments welcomed. 

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"YOU know, we really have to blame the politicians for all this”, said the ancient, modulated voice from the front row. “Clinton wanted us to give mortgages to the blacks, and we did so. Bush wanted us to give mortgages to the Hispanics, and we did that too. Yes, I'm a banker. But why blame me?”

You couldn't script it. But as I came to the conclusion of my week both working for, and wandering around, the Edinburgh International Book Festival – and the city in general – it struck me that Edinburgh is a place which has a very distinct script indeed, running away beneath the milling bourgeoisie and shilling performers of the season.

The voice at the beginning was piping up at the end of a session with the journalist John Lanchester, explaining his funny, furious account of the financial crisis, Whoops! But with every elegant and well-informed question from the audience – “Shouldn't we blame profit-driven ratings agencies like Moody's?”, “What about a kite mark for banks who submit to a liquidity-based levy?” - you slowly realised where you were. 

This is a city filled with hordes of financial “innovators” (and maybe a few traditionalists), who naturally knew how to “speak Money”, as Lanchester put it.

Listen to the Weegie, some of you might be muttering: where was he during the last ten years of Goodwinolatry, exponential house prices, Harvey Nichols? Mostly either 51.3 miles west or in London, as it happens: Edinburgh is experientially stranger to me than both Camden or Hillhead. It usually drags me over, or upwards, because its concentrations of capital – political, financial and cultural – are too strong to resist.

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: The passing of Reid & Morgan is about the future, not nostalgia

Delighted to be posting my first 'notes from everywhere' column from the Caledonian Mercury and welcome to all those who've clicked through. Thoughtland will be my blog for exploring big ideas in Scottish life, and I'll be posting a combination of CalMerc columns, original pieces, clipping from other important articles and (hopefully) a regular interview podcast (time and energy permitting). If you'd like to contact me directly, mail playethical@gmail.com

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It's quite a moment to be starting a weekly Scottish column again. This was a fortnight when two of our political and cultural titans succumbed to cancer, causing many to dwell on the direction of their nation and culture.

But the deaths of Jimmy Reid and Edwin Morgan shouldn't be about nostalgia for possibilities lost or past. They were two progressive futurists, who in their own ways tried to keep the options open in Scotland.

At the start of the heartfelt collective outpouring for Reid over the last week, I was phoning up Glasgow University library to find out if they had the complete text of his '72 Rectorial address. I'd read it when I was preparing for my own 1990 Rectorial: and as I tracked down the famous front-page reprint on the front of the New York Times, I noticed a section hadn't made it to publication.

Here's the passage: “If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change.

““The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with, and in service to our fellow human beings can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.”

Now, it'd be easy to say that all this “leisure society” stuff is even more seventies than Jimmy's famous sideburns. Look how the application of hi-tech turned out, at least in this part of the world.

Workaholism for an educated middle-class, enslaved to global schedules and now-now-now consumer expectations. Underemployment and unemployment for those whose labour became an development opportunity for India, China and elsewhere (not least in shipbuilding). Capital markets driven to hyperspeed by automatic computer exchanges, escaping the grip of any human authority.

We were promised jetpacks, indeed.

Jimmy's saving insight comes in his first clause – “accompanied as it must be with full employment”. If Reid was a young man today, he'd be thumping some tubs in Scotland about the inevitability of jobs losses across public and private sectors.

I suggest, however, that he'd have forced us to be honest about the last forty years. New technology did offer us more free time for the “creative use of leisure, in communion with and in service to our fellow human beings” – but we exchanged it for money, overwork and consumerism.

Add the financial crisis to our carbon-environmental crisis, and a grand questioning of the Scottish lifestyle is about to begin. How many working hours do we really need to put in, and how much stuff do we need to have? And can Scots be visionary about using the political “sovereignty” we have in order to answer those questions?

If we give credence to Jimmy's vision that “the flowering of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone’s development”, then we couldn't find a greater exemplar of that than Edwin Morgan.

No-one should doubt the centrality of the man to Scottish popular culture. I was able to wrest my 13-year-old daughter out of the coils of Facebook with news of Morgan's death - she'd covered him for English last year. For about 30 blissful mins the boy-man Justin Bieber was forgotten, and the language of visiting Martians, Loch Ness Monsters, and the Computer's First Xmas was happily explored and remembered.

Out of many early moments of pride at the opening of the Scottish Parliament, Edwin's celebratory poem was so completely appropriate it would have made you burst: garrulous, funny, aspirational, politically savvy, elegant and demotic as it needed to be.

In touch with all the avant-garde movements of his era – particularly cybernetics – Morgan's poetry imagined the consciousness of machines, aliens, geology. He was just as interested in the possibilities of technology and science to enable a “quality of life” as any idealistic Clydeside activist. It's reported that in Morgan's final days, the best service his friends could do was to bring him regular copies of Scientific American, National Geographic and the New York Review of Books to his bedside. 

Edwin's years as an educator at Glasgow University overlapped with Reid's as a Rector there, which gives you some sense of the quality of the era. But we shouldn't just be pining for radical heydays. Between the gay modernist, and the Govan communist, there's a reservoir of possibilities for the Scottish future that shows no signs of drying up. I hope to have some fun charting them over the next while, in this fine online publication.

For more from Pat Kane on Scottish affairs, visit www.thoughtland.info