Thoughtland

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]

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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.

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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. 

Map of Thoughtland: Craig Murray

British democracy has lost its meaning. The political and economic system has come to serve the interests of a tiny elite, vastly wealthier than the run of the population, operating through corporate control. The state itself exists to serve the interests of these corporations, guided by a political class largely devoid of ideological belief and preoccupied with building their own careers and securing their own finances.

via www.craigmurray.org.uk

Thoughtland met Craig Murray at the excellent public event organised by the Scottish Independence Convention in Glasgow a few days ago. His high-profile resignation as Ambassador to Uzbekistan in 2004, accusing the UK government of collusion (along with the CIA) in torture to extract intelligence from 'war on terror' suspects. A "character", as they'd say in the Central Belt - but his blog is a clearly written and extremely well-informed overview of the depradations of the British diplomatic state, from a man who would like an independent Scotland to do a hell of a lot better.