Thoughtland

Being "Yes" (from Bella Caledonia)

First published in Bella Caledonia, Oct 16, 2012.

So into the maelstrom we go. As someone with skin in the independence game for 25 years – among older generations with a lot more scars and frustrations than I bear – it feels like a culminating moment.

 In between day jobs (and night jobs), the email inbox and the twitterstreams bulge with papers, briefings, advice, admonition, media invites. One would like Professor Higgs to discover a new fold in the space-time continuum, so that they can all be read and properly digested.

The old paradigms that got you from pub conversation to pub conversation (Independence in Europe? Claim of Right? Democratic Intellect, or Deficit?) have to be sharpened up, retrofitted, for the media fray (and for those same pubs too).

At this end of the YesScotland campaign, as a willing member of the Advisory Board, the experience is a weird combination of political-science-cramming, and a happy, existential calm. Make your best case for independence, because here’s the clear run you never thought you’d ever get. Bliss it is in this very dawn to be alive, and a’ that.

But while munching through EU requirements on national central banks, or the comparative advantage of green-tech industrial policy (yes, it’s all fun and games), a phrase has popped into my head which helps orient me in the middle of all this. It’s not new, an adaptation, but it’s inescapable.

 “Be the Scotland you wish to see”. You’ll instantly recognise it from the famous Gandhi quote, “Be the change you want to see in the world”. (You can stick “in the world” on at the end if you want – but you know, pop lyricists and their end-rhymes…). What am I taking this to mean? That the way we conduct our advocacy and arguments for independence must model and embody the kind of country we want to bring about.

My friend Gerry Hassan has written a lot about how disfigured and self-subverting the language of Scottish political discourse is. And Iain Macwhirter has often pointed out in the past the wild absurdity of Scottish politics – that is, the way that four generally convergent centre-left political parties in Scottish life (the SNP, Scottish Labour, the Greens, and the non-Orange-book Liberal Democrats) tear absolute lumps out of each other in a devolved parliament chamber. And it’s usually around the question of what powers Holyrood does or doesn’t have, to be able to full realize the interests of the Scottish people.

Well, with a single yes-no question on independence and a YesScotland campaign opening its doors to all, here’s a new situation. Within the context of a binding option to attain the full powers of national government, how can we face each other in a new way as thinking, feeling, responsible Scots? Under the umbrella of a commitment to progress and development – with the essential economic and political tools of nation-statehood to achieve that – what new agreements can we forge about building the good society in Scotland?

My hope for YesScotland is that it becomes the space within which we will “be the Scotland we wish to see in the world” – that is, a fair-minded, forward-facing nation, which draws strength from the different visions of progress and improvement that circulate among us. But knowing that, under independence, we will have the powers, and the responsibility, to turn those debates into real policy and national direction.

So yes, the SNP is a major force in YesScotland – how could it not be? But I’ve always been happy to say that I’ve had the privilege to vote for three independence-supporting parties in the lifetime of the Scottish parliament – and due to our proportional system, in all manner of tricky combinations. So it’s genuinely exciting to have the Greens and the SSP as part of YesScotland.

Their presence enriches our national conversation – or perhaps I should say now, the “independence conversation”. As far as I can see, there are some key systemic challenges that underlie all parties and politics in Scotland – the questions of poor life-chances, in health as well as wealth, for far too many people; the question of how we balance strong economic activity with the urgent climatic crisis of our planet. Nobody has a monopoly of answers on these issues. But independence is a brand new context within which to approach some solutions. And a proper diversity of opinion is a strength, not a “lack of focus” or “weakness”.

Is this space open to those who have an ideological identification with an existing party – but that party happens to be currently defending the Union and promoting a “No” vote? To some degree that’s already happening: for example, Allan Grogan’s Labour for an Independent Scotland is a great indicator. Lib-Dems for Independence would be more than welcome (and Tories for Independence too, though we’d have to despatch a therapist to help them with cognitive dissonance).

As someone who (depending on the day’s weather) will describe himself ideologically as a Scottish social democrat, or a Scottish democratic socialist, my feeling for the Labour Party in Scotland, both members, representatives and voters, is acute. It cannot be pleasant to find yourself on a platform with representatives of a Coalition government whose values are so opposed to your own.

And worse, to hear your own Labour leaders, north and south of the border, accept the wrong-headed austerity budget limits of the Coalition (never mind their party’s continuing financial commitment to the replacement of Trident). And on that limited basis, watch them attack the majority of Scots who receive and take pride in universal benefits as a “something-for-nothing” culture.

I completely accept how violating it is to abandon one party identity and embrace another – many people coming from a “Labour” background (and I’m one of them) feel many decades of responsibility to those who have struggled before them, to bring about better conditions for working people. To “cross the line” can easily feel like a betrayal of foremothers and forefathers.

  

But YesScotland should be the space into which a Labour-identifier can freely walk, and there meet fellow Scots – with explicit party labels, or with none whatsoever – who want to progress and develop the country, in as direct and immediate way as possible, through a vote for independence.

What will that space actually look like? To start with, it’s an address on Hope Street in Glasgow: the YesScotland HQ will launch soon, and it should soon become the buzziest place in the country. To quote Emma Goldman, “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” – so there will be a big channelling of the range of creative and artistic people who support independence, into events and experiences which will express the joy and conviviality of what we want to bring about.

And as a digital network, YesScotland will also become a portal, or a radar-scan, for events conducted in the same spirit throughout the country – as well as the main repository for the strongest policy arguments for independence. Don’t bemoan the media, become the media, will be the basic approach.

A 100 weeks to occupy ourselves: doesn’t look like we’ll have much of a problem, does it? But one way for it to be a life-enhancing, rather than a soul-shredding experience, is – for me at least – to keep my neo-Gandhian phrase in mind. For Yes supporters, “being the Scotland you wish to see” is try to conduct yourself in a way that emphasizes friendliness, calmness and honesty, but also idealism, hope and optimism.

Extending the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds is of course right in and of itself – and it may well not be numerically significant either way. But as a means of bringing energy and enthusiasm and a love of novelty into the political process, it at least chimes with the spirit of YesScotland.

Think about it. In a world full of cheap diversions, horror stories and looming anxieties, we actually have a rare chance in our lives to bring about a change for the better in our immediate conditions. And in a way which simply requires us to be thoughtful Scottish citizens, to our fullest and richest degree. No matter our position, let’s enjoy exercising all our dormant faculties over these next two years. Not just “game on” – but let’s “raise the game” itself.

  

Pat Kane is one half of Hue And Cry, runs the Thoughtland blog, and is on the Advisory Board of YesScotland. 

Scotland on Sunday column: A "Yes" to a strong debate about independence

This is the unedited version of my column for Scotland on Sunday (here's printed copy). There are a few crucial paragraphs reinstated here which give the piece more balance - please take this post as definitive. It was also a great opportunity to announce my appointment to the advisory board of YesScotland - very excited and proud. As usual, all comments very welcome. 

 Pat Kane: A ‘Yes’ vote is not just for independence, it can let us find our own direction

Scotland on Sunday, 8 July 2012

“It’s not just about taking Scotland’s side, it’s about taking sides in Scotland”. Jim Sillars’ axiom has been rattling round my head a lot, in these opening weeks of the referendum campaign.

For those independistas who still can’t quite believe they have a clear run at the big prize while in their prime (waves hand furiously), there is an understandable hesitation about exactly how to go forward. And in order to make an authentic, resonant case for ‘Yes’, both parts of Jim’s wise words have to be reckoned with. 

Natural and satisfying, of course, simply to take Scotland’s side. Indeed, Scottish politics has been running off the fumes of a consensus patriotism since the referendum that instituted the Scottish Parliament in 1999. 

We might deride Jack McConnell’s “best wee country in the world” slogan (those billboards at Glasgow Airport were replaced, let us recall, by paens to RBS). But we have an SNP administration which is no less unrepentantly boosterist about this wee country than the man in the dull grey kilt.

In his circuits through China, the Middle-East, Northern Europe and recently California, Alex Salmond trails clouds of glorious joint-projects in his wake, simulating a Scottish economic diplomacy that already has its feet under the top international tables in Brussels and New York. 

From playing the straight man with Craig Ferguson and Brave’s Merida, to swapping sustainability tips and tools with the oligarchs of Qatar and China (and the social-democrats of Scandinavia), the Salmond brand is partly about quelling the Scottish cringe. The First Minister and his Cabinet are modelling what it would look like to act with confidence and competence on a world stage. Even Kenny Macaskill’s Megrahi ruling, however controversial, was partly about reinforcing Scots law’s global status. 

Taking Scotland’s side in this way - that is, prosecuting “the Scottish interest” at the highest available levels - is intended to make voters feel more secure about a clear vote for statehood. An independent Scotland is not a shivering youth stepping out into a demanding adult world, but already one of the grown-ups in the room of geopolitics.

But it’s possible to be, as it were, too “grown-up” - so transfixed by the “credibility” questions around Scottish independence that, at least around the edges, you begin to lose the radical and transformative point of the whole exercise. Then it’s becomes difficult not to start taking sides in Scotland. 

Salmond and Murdoch, for example. The least of our concerns should be the question of a “quid pro quo” between Salmond’s support for the BSkyB takeover, and the Sun’s turnaround in support for the SNP. 

I’ve no doubt that, in the chambers of the FM’s mind, he felt perfectly able to divide and rule his interests: a Scottish “jobs jobs jobs” justification for privately lobbying for the bid on one side; the need to get some independence propaganda into the heart of a traditionally Unionist commercial press on the other. 

But down the middle is the kind of policy gap that we’ll have to raise a stramash about in the next 2 years, if independence is to be anything more than an abstract aspiration to self-determination. For example, is any measure that justifies “jobs jobs jobs” in Scotland to be uncritically accepted? All jobs in the military-industrial sector, to any customer on the planet? Will there be a tension between a Government that commits to a “living wage” for all employees, and a Scandinavian-style welfare system - but which also holds out a full repertoire of low-tax flexibilities for visiting corporations? 

And on the other side, what kind of media environment should we have in an independent Scotland? It’s not enough for Salmond to say that media regulation is a reserved matter, thus debarring him from taking any critical position on the BSkyB merger. Into such a vacuum rushes all manner of fevered speculation - for example, a Scottish state welcoming News International into a specially-deregulated kailyard, like our ain wee McBerlusconi. 

Now, remember this is also a First Minister who launched a Broadcasting Commission aimed at creating (in his words) an “architecture of participation” in this country, inspired by the bottom-up energies of social media and creative programme-makers. So all need not be lost, in a ticker-tape of Tunnocks wrappers. 

But on topics like this, and many others (potential NATO membership, or car-centric capital expenditure, being the obvious examples), it’s the job of a somewhat noisy independence movement - and particularly the left and green side of it - to keep the radical-reform instincts of SNP government ministers alive, lurking just beneath those lush pashminas and worsted lapels.  

We go into the next two years with this movement showing signs of coherence and vigour, amplified by technology and suffused with talent. Take excellent blogs/bloggers and online magazines like Bella Caledonia, Better Nation, Scottish Left Review, Newsnet Scotland, Lallands Peat Warrior, Bright Green, National Collective and others. 

These already comprise the new media of a “radical Scotland” - one that at least matches, and probably surpasses, the fondly remembered political magazine of the 80s. The Scottish Independence Convention (SIC) has for years doggedly kept its doors open to all parties who supported the basic concept, and is now rightly reaping its rewards in terms of centrality and influence. There’s even a Radical Independence Conference occupying (if that’s the right word) a Radisson hotel in Glasgow sometime soon. 

A few days ago, I was asked to be on the advisory board of the YesScotland campaign, along with Elaine C. Smith, chairperson of the SIC, Colin Fox of the SSP, and a goodly spread of the other estaits and pairts of contemporary Scotland. I replied with an eager “Yes”. 

For what we should be assenting to in this campaign is the possibility of taking Scotland’s side through taking sides in Scotland. A “Yes” vote is not just about the self-evident truth that resident Scots, of all shapes and stripes, are the best people to fully determine their own future. 

It’s also a vote in our ability to come up with a progressive direction for our society - and a confidence about that emerging from honest and robust debate about economics, health, defense, education, housing, welfare, media and everything else.

Deep down, I enjoy Alex’s combo of sonsy gladhanding, and fluent statesmanship, as much as the next independista. But if we’re modelling behaviour, we also need to model the diverse engagement, the grass-roots energy, the democratic intellect that we wish to see in the everyday life of an independent Scotland. That’s what I hope for YesScotland. And as the ultimate contrarian, I’m sure Mr Sillars would agree.

Scotsman essay: Scotland, SF and politics

This is the unedited version of my "Perspective" piece for the Scotsman on the relationship between science fiction, politics and Scotland (printed version here). All comments welcome, as usual. 

Pat Kane: Beam us Scotties up, Alex

Published in Scotsman on Friday 15 June, 2012

“He canna Scotland see what yet/Canna see the infinite/And Scotland in true scale to it”. As far back as Hugh Macdiarmid (and maybe even as far back as the Brahan Seer) Scotland has had a complex relationship with the future - both the future you want to bring about, and the future you want to prevent happening. 

Whether it’s Star Trek’s Scotty chirpily tweaking his dilithum crystals to full capacity, or Robert Louis Stevenson predicting that medical science could allow us to unleash our inner monster, we do the future in Scotland like we do most things: to aye be where extremes meet.  

The unofficial slogan of the new Scotland - “work as if you were in the early days of a better nation”, quoted from the top politicians downwards - comes from Alasdair Gray’s 1981 dystopian novel Lanark. This portrays a totalitarian future Glasgow as ‘Unthank’, its ruling classes involved in grisly genetic experiments and mind-control. Gray’s hopeful, optimistic slogan defies the darkness of his own book. 

There seems to be a fruitful (if not exclusive) relationship between science-fiction and independence politics at the moment. Alex Salmond is the first politician to be honoured as a “Starfleet Officer” in the world’s largest Star Trek fan organisation. Salmond is a self-confessed “Trekkie”, revealing in 2010 that he would pretend to be the hyper-rationalist Vulcan Spock in his schoolboy bedroom mirror, making and hoarding audio recordings of the original 60s tv series. 

Fellow SNP leading light Rosanna Cunningham is also a Trekkie. “It’s the ultimate ‘what-if?”, she once said - a understandable passion for a progressive nationalist to adopt. Noted SF authors like Mark Millar and Iain Banks have firmly nailed their colours to the independence mast. Our first Makar, Edwin Morgan, is famous both for integrating SF into his poetry - his poem “The First Men on Mercury” is a staple in Scottish schools - and also for magicking up a million pounds to fund the Yes campaign. 

There’s no automatic SF-independence link, though. That refined-looking ex-Doctor-Who, David Tennant, is a staunch Labourite. And in these very pages, Iain Gray - not previously known for his matter-transporting tendencies - displayed an intimate understanding of the “Culture” framework that lies behind Iain “M” Banks’ science-fiction novels. Who would have guessed that behind Mr Gray’s thrawn exterior, his imagination thrilled to the prospect of a hedonistic, body-morphing galactic civilization? 

But it’s worth dwelling a little on how science-fiction sits with the imagination of policy in general. The Nobel prize-winning Princeton economist Paul Krugman, scourge of austerity and inflexible economic management across the globe, is actually the fan-boy of a Edinburgh SF author called Charles Stross. 

They’ve debated and discussed in science-fiction conventions, with the Nobellist thrilling to Stross’s careering tales of abundant technology causing crime, carnival and perversion. An economist who urges us to be creative with our collective indebtedness - but who also loves SF visions of scarcity being abolished, in the era of robots, nano-tech and synthetic biology. Surely some connection there. 

The relationship between science-fiction and politics/policy cannot, by definition, be predictable. Arthur C. Clarke may have strongly advised that “politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories”, because “one of the biggest roles of SF is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of mind”. Yet that flexibility can go into very extreme areas.

America is key here. Whether it’s Kennedy’s space-race conducted in the era of Star Trek, or Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile shield shaped by SF author Jerry Pournelle, to the connections between games designers, movie scriptwriters and defense research departments in the current era. (Not to mention Obama’s love of robot drone killings as a way to fight Al-Qaida). There has always been a live dynamic between American supremacy and expansionism, and science-fiction dreaming. 

The US’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency - or DARPA - seems unashamedly targeted at bringing about the more militial visions of SF into reality. Robot soldiers, digital telepathy, invisibility cloaks, brain implants... all in the service of “full spectrum dominance”. 

Look at the coming slate of Hollywood’s SF blockbuster movies for 2013, and most of them are about future war of one kind or another - featuring characters that are poster-boys (and sometimes girls) for the kind of cyborg futures and human enhancements that many forecasters think will be the big commercial industries of the next fifty years.  

Who could soften us up for a certain kind of post-human future better than the effortlessly cool Robert Downey Jnr in Iron Man - the guy who made his fortune from military research, yet still wears a Black Sabbath t-shirt over his nuclear-powered heart?  

Does it matter that our science-fiction imaginations are over-conditioned by America? SF advocates often proclaim loudly about not being interested in such puny limits as national boundaries - while peddling US values in almost every other mainstream production. 

 Surely one of the attractions of the revived Doctor Who franchise, and its Torchwood spin-off, is that this is a defiantly “British” (though recently largely English) take on the vistas of the future. Agatha Christie battling giant alien wasps in her refectory. Latexed baddies with impeccable RP accents launching galactic domination from, er, Cardiff. Gentle explorations of bashful sexuality between Time-Lords and their assistants.

ITV’S Primeval treads the same ground, with its shilpit heroes dodging velociraptors in the aisles of your local Lidl’s. The soon-to-be-revived BBC space comedy series Red Dwarf is even more explicitly counter-American - where Scousers and Estuary Men deflate their cartoon Yank associates, inside wobbly Airfix-style space crates. 

Yet still, it’s hard to think of an SF future on the screen which has anything like a Scottish derivation or locus. More often than not, we’re set dressing: whether it’s Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch, 70s Glasgow as gloomy backdrop to the ultimate surveillance society; or next year’s World War Z with Brad Pitt, where the same city stands in for Philadelphia as the battleground for a future zombie war. 

If the budgets are much, much lower - basically, ink on a page - Scotland makes it into the SF imaginary. Ken McLeod’s left-libertarian alternative futures often use the locales of his background - Plockton, Lochcarron and Miavaig - as theatres for his space opera. 

“I’ve made them the battlefields of wars both guerilla and global”, he wrote recently. “Crashed flying saucers and tactical nukes into them. Crushed them under the mechanical sprawl of runaway artificial intelligences. Choked them with mutant jungles. Made their sea-lochs ring with the din of spaceship yards. Settled their villages with ageless retirees scoffing illegal life-extension drugs. Carpeted their roofs and walls with thick insulation against the big freeze as the Gulf Stream downshifts”. 

Millar and Morrison are well-known for interpolating random Scots into their futurescapes. Both are graduates of the comic 2000AD, whose spokesman Micheal Molcher recently said that “our success rests on a whole coterie of Scottish writing talent that has joined us over the years. Our Scottish writers” - like John Wagner and Alan Grant, creators of Judge Dredd - “lend a specific voice to the publication, which is cynical, satirical, sarcastic and darkly humorous. 2000AD really does excel at the subversive, anti-establishment, Scottish voice – and that voice is the comic's success." 

“We’ll get by selling cars”, sings Micheal Marra in his song Australia Instead of the Stars, wryly lamenting the failure of Dundee inventor Sandy Kidd’s anti-gravity gyroscope. “We know what we are”. But what do we want to be? Perhaps alongside the grim urban “murrdurrs” and Celtic sentimentalities of Pixar’s Brave, we could ask our image-merchants (tv, film and games) to raise themselves to the challenge of creating some audio-visual Scottish science fiction worthy of the name. 

Who will rise to the challenge of producing Gray’s Lanark, or Banks’s Culture, or Morgan’s interplanetary meditations, or McLeod’s techno-highlands for our screens? More than another retread of the William Wallace story, I’d like to see the national imagination boldly going where no Jock Tamson has gone before. At the very least, you’ll get support for that from quite a few space cadets in Holyrood - on both sides of the aisle. 

Does the SNP need NATO, because NATO will keep us shipbuilding? Scotsman Essay

This is the unedited version of my Scotsman essay on the SNP leadership's shift away from an anti-NATO foreign policy for an independent Scotland. As ever, all comments welcome. (I appeared on subsequently on a Radio Two show celebrating Costello and Wyatt's great song Shipbuilding, and repeated many of the arguments written here). 

* * *

It's a song I've been performing for 25 years now, and I doubt I'll ever stop. Shipbuilding - recorded by Robert Wyatt, with lyrics by Elvis Costello and music by Clive Langer - was a minor hit in the British charts, reaching number 35 on May 28, 1983. 

But as a response to the Falklands War, concluded the year before, it's fair to say that Shipbuilding has become a classic of political songwriting. Referencing the Cammell-Laird shipyards of his youth in the Wirral, Costello focused on the moral dilemmas of the skilled working-class and the benefit they derived from the industrial war-machine. 

Like many independence-supporting Scots of a left persuasion, I have been extremely disquieted by the recent press speculation about a possible reversal of the SNP’s stance on NATO - from non-involvement, to possible membership after independence. And I can’t get the urgency of Costello’s song out of my head and heart. 

The key questions in my mind are these. Is the SNP’s advocacy of membership of NATO rooted in a desire to participate in a wave of reform of this Cold-War-era, nuclear-defined military command? 

Or is it a way to retain Scotland’s military-industrial complex - its Rosyths and Clyde shipyards, its bases with ancillary services and industries - under cover of an ostensibly “credible” commitment to European collective security? To be blunt about it: does the SNP need NATO, because NATO will keep us shipbuilding? 

Before we even explore these options, I am presuming a “red line” in Scottish independence politics that cannot be crossed - and that is the decommissioning, and then physical removal of Trident missiles from Scottish soil, under the shortest possible timeline, upon the achievement of full independence. 

Too many Scots - many of them the disillusioned Labour voters that enable the SNP’s two game-changing electoral victories - have invested their moral hopes in such an outcome, for it to be mitigated or fudged in any way. The removal of Trident cannot be a “Guantanamo closure” that never really closes; nor a version of the shabby, pecuniary leasing arrangement whereby Ukraine derives a rent from hosting Russia’s missiles. 

The Scotland-in-NATO question brings it all to a head. The chief objection from the Scottish Left is that NATO still defines itself as a nuclear alliance in the last instance, with the US as its ultimate guarantor, and with “first-use” of weapons still a defining protocol. 

We might be able to enter as a “non-nuclear” member - but by doing so, we still legitimate a nuclear umbrella. Even 5 out of the 25 officially “non-nuclear” states in NATO - Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Turkey - host 200 forward-deployed US ‘tactical’ nuclear weapons, under a ‘nuclear task sharing’ arrangement. 

In terms of the general spirit of non-proliferation, this enduringly nuclear NATO - which include the expansion of a new joint missile defence system, protecting “populations and territories against a ballistic missile attack” as a “core element” of collective defence - is still geopolitically dangerous. In particular, facing this extensive nuclearisation of Europe, Russia is given no incentive to reduce its vast stockpile of missiles. 

Yes, there is a “battle of narratives” in NATO presently, as Scottish-based Nato Watch’s Ian Davis puts it - Germany would like to remove US missiles from its soil, with support from Scandinavian nations. In Davis’s view “it would be helpful to have a progressive Scottish voice within NATO, arguing on the side of the angels”. 

Yet as he also admits, “if NATO cannot agree to withdraw these anachronistic weapons after three Strategic Concept reviews, it says a lot about the decision-making process (and overall legitimacy) of the alliance”. And, relatedly, about the hubris of a Scotland thinking it can influence such a frozen, big-power-dominated alliance from the inside.

The “credible” position for an independent Scotland might well be to get involved in this melee, for all manner of realpolitik (for example, smoothing the way to EU membership). However, if we want an “ethical foreign policy” - to recall a recent aspiration - we should stand outwith the NATO nuclear umbrella, on the basis of objecting to its current stance as blocking non-proliferation.  

In terms of Scotland’s global impact as a newly independent country, don’t we stand to gain hugely, in terms of national branding and progressive soft power - and in a world of asymmetric threats, even in terms of domestic security - if we comprehensively reject our association with the ultimate instruments of hard power? 

A sovereign Scotland should be confident enough to allow our post-independence security arrangements and alliances to evolve over time, shaped by debate within a new and invigorated Scottish polity. Rather than seek an ostentatiously and presumptively “credible” posture that implicates us in a nuclear future many Scots are vowed to oppose. 

And this brings me to the “shipbuilding” question. Malcolm Chalmers’ very useful research paper for the Scotsman on the future of defence in an independent Scotland sets out the hard budgetary realities. Derived from the spending of comparable small NATO states, like Norway and Denmark, Chalmers estimates a Scottish defense budget of between £1.7 and £2.1 billion - though Lithuania’s is £0.9 billion, and non-NATO Ireland is £0.6 billion. 

Barring the effective protection of resources in sea territories, and contributions to coordinated anti-terror measures and humanitarian missions, what requires Scotland to spend unnecessary billions of precious post-independence revenue on its military? 

Going by SNP advisor Jennifer Dempsie’s recent column in this paper, the main argument would seem to be sustaining our military-industrial complex. She suggests a Scottish defense budget of £2.5 billion, an increase on current UK spending here, which would help the Scottish Government to “stand up for Govan”. She explicitly cites BAE Systems, currently toiling to build an aircraftless aircraft carrier for the Royal Navy, as worthy of attention when the job is finished in 2015. “In an independent Scotland”, she writes, “our yards will secure orders on the basis of their skills and record – Scottish shipyards already build ships for countries outside the UK”.

Hold on a minute. Am I expected to express economic patriotism for BAE Systems as a “Scottish shipyard”? The BAE that pays hundreds of millions in fines for breaking military export rules of its weaponry to unstable nations, and for perpetrating wholesale bribery throughout the Middle East? 

Dempsie vaunts Scotland’s “unique facilities and skills” for collaborative defence procurement. Might that include, perhaps, the collective procurement demanded by Scotland’s active NATO membership? This sounds less like an engaged agenda for “shaping the narrative” of the Alliance - and more about ensuring business for our military sector.

There seems to be an insufficiency of imagination and will in the SNP that swords can be turned into ploughshares - or to use the technical term, “arms conversion and diversification”. Are we unable to imagine diverting, say, a billion of the SNP’s projected defense budget towards an investment in civil R&D - and in particular, the range of sustainable technologies and infrastructures that we claim as our primary economic and productive future? Ian Davis, and Isobel Lindsay of Scottish CND, both suggest that we should set up a commission to accurately determine Scottish “national needs” in military provision. 

There is a lingering militarism in Scottish national identity, from our cheesier national anthems to our ambivalence towards the “bonnie fechters” of our regiments. Sometimes, I think it quietly conditions the responses of those who, in the main, have the very best interests of Scotland at heart. Let's also be electorally informed here. For an SNP worried about their low support among women - who also poll much higher in their opposition to nukes and military interventions than men - can they afford to signal a shift toward a NATO still bristling with militial menace? 

We need a substantive public debate about Scottish independence and NATO. Properly and intelligently conducted, it will show us off to the watching world at our best. To slightly rewrite one of Costello’s lines: we are skilled in more, much more, than warship-building.

Soft power, nation-branding and Scottish independence - Scotsman essay

Below is the pre-edited version of my article on soft power and Scottish independence for The Scotsman - a considerably cut-down version for the paper/website is here. All comments welcomed. Links will be embedded in the next few days. 

We have the (soft) power 

Scotland holds a positive image in the world, through the strength of its culture and values, writes Pat Kane, but an acrimonious referendum build-up might change all that. 

Pre-edited version of article in The Scotsman, 24 Feb, 2012

Look up “Scottish soft power” on Google, and you find a fascinating little vignette. A British diplomat in the Ukraine tells a story of a local Burns night - Macsween’s haggis flown over, schoolchildren in Pechersk reciting Burns in kilts, tickets to Gleneagles sold in a business-networking raffle. “It’s great to see Scottish soft power spreading its benign influence across Kiev”, says the evidently decent Leigh Turner. 

Soft power - meaning, in Joseph Nye’s classic definition, “the ability to influence others through culture, values and ideology rather than threat, violence or other forms of coercion” (otherwise known as “hard power”) - is one of the new tools in the kit of 21st century statecraft. Every geo-politician, from China to Chile, is attempting to become literate in “public diplomacy” - as soft power is otherwise known - of one kind or another. 

Attending to the global impact of our “national brand” has been an explicit target of the Scottish Parliament for a decade now, even before the SNP’s ascendancy (remember Jack McConnell’s ill-fated “the best small country in the world?”). But what will the coming independence referendum do for Scotland’s global reputation? Does Scotland’s soft power depend on the actual result of the eventual vote - or as much on how that result was conducted and debated? 

Since 2009, the Scottish Government has been buying into Simon Anholt’s Nation Brand Index - a well-recognised measurement of the “competitive identity” of 50 nations across the five continents, as perceived globally. Even in its devolved state, Scotland does extraordinarily well - the 15th best-regarded country in the world, alongside other small nations like Finland, Denmark, New Zealand and Ireland. On its six dimensions of its global perception, Scotland scores highest on “governance”, “tourism”, and “people” - and lowest on “exports”. 

Available on the Scottish Goverment’s website, there’s much to dig into in Anholt’s report - but the least that it delivers is a sense of Scotland’s existing global impact. Anholt describes his recipe for a successful, soft-powered national brand as “a three-legged stool”. One leg is strategy (a clear sense of national ambition and values), another substance (policies which exemplify those), and the last what he calls “symbolic actions” - particular events which bring the world’s attention to that nation’s direction and achievements. 

There’s no doubt that the independence referendum qualifies perfectly as one of Anholt’s “symbolic actions”. The question is: will it transmit as a positive, inspiring story of progress and empowerment, recognizable as such by citizens throughout the world? Or will it be seen as a snarling, resentful divorce, clouded in bitter recrimination and endless dispute? 

My partner, Indra Adnan, runs a consultancy called Soft Power Network, which advises companies and governments on strategy in this area. She notes that Scotland at the moment “has a huge stock of soft power” globally. Because it is somewhat distanced from Westminster, it has all the positive points of British soft power – its English language, its richness of customs, culture, values – but few of the negative ones.

As Anholt’s nation-brand index suggests, we are esteemed for the quality of our people (both in terms of employability and hospitability), the educational and entertainment value of our traditions and cultures, and an aspiration towards good governance. The political argument for independence also distances us from the “old story of British Empire”: nuclear missiles and adventuring armies, a rapacious City of London, an exploiter of others’ resources. 

Yet the manner in which the debate leading to an independence vote is conducted, Adnan says, will be vital as to whether Scotland’s global soft power is enriched or depleted post-election. 

Norway is our exemplar in many ways, but particularly in this respect. How does a nation come to “own the brand for peace”, as the Norwegians do? Crucially, through actions, not hype. Beyond the Nobel Prize, Norway is involved in 20 long term global partnerships for peace, from Palestine to Sri Lanka; its massive oil-derived sovereign wealth fund is notable for the high ethical criteria of its investments. 

In terms of soft power and national brand, Norwegian credibility comes from its integrity - the values of its society being consistently and visibly realised over time, in policies and structures. As the globe sees a Scottish government arguing for independence over these next two years, says Adnan, there has to be a consistency about its higher aims. 

“Humiliation of the former partner and destruction of what was partly seen as a global success will not transmit well as soft power”, she notes. “But if Scotland can tell a story of greater efficiency and more creative interaction across the islands - aiming at the increased general happiness of all parties - it will look like a country ready to do global business. 

“If it can frame its breaking away as a natural development rather than a withdrawal from a partnership it has fallen out of love with, it will be able to retain much of its former status on the global stage. Hard power is a zero sum game – everyone takes sides and someone will lose. Soft power is a win-win – more difficult to achieve but worth the game.” 

Perhaps unavoidably, the SNP would seem to be trying to deploy both hard-power and soft-power strategies at the moment. Calling BBC editors “Gaulitiers” and referendum-fixing Unionist political leaders “anti-Scottish”; making legalistic claims over territorial energy resources, European membership or the use of Sterling in a monetary zone; deriding Westminster talk of border posts or imminent impoverishment - this is the kind of grappling over control and resources that is the old hard-power story of tension between nations. 

But equally, the Scottish Government is cascading love-bombs of soft power everywhere. Take Salmond’s ideas-campaign across the English cities recently, offering Scotland as a “progressive beacon” to inspire other electorates on the island (alongside an embrace of British continuties like the Monarchy, or BBC programming). Also consider promotions like the Gathering, the Commonwealth Games and the Year of Creative Scotland, which build upon the continuing global cultural impact of Edinburgh festivals and golfing spectaculars. 

And perhaps even more sophisticatedly, take Salmond’s journeying into Qatar and China - invoking Al-Jazeera and renewable energy with the former, and receiving both pandas and Adam-Smith-olatry from the latter. This is an attempt to begin a story about Scottish power that imagines dialogue with difficult, as well as easy (meaning western democratic) partners.

The most interesting question in terms of global perceptions of Scotland’s independence-power comes from two areas: the green “reindustrialisation” of Scotland, and the removal of Trident missiles (and consequent redefinition of our military-industrial complex). 

Anholt’s nation-brand index shows that, in terms of global perception, Scotland scores high on “governance” - how our national government is “judged on competency and fairness, as well as its perceived commitment to global issues such as peace, poverty and the environment”. There could be no more globally-significant contribution to that reputation than a non-proliferating, nuclear-free, and UN-compliant Scottish state military. 

However, we are judged low on “exports” - “the image of products and services from each country, their contribution to innovation in science and technology and the degree to which a country is recognised as a creative place”. Yet there’s one obvious way that rating could be organically improved. 

The discourse of Scotland as a green energy powerhouse could build upon that already positive "governance" rating, as an environmentally-conscious nation - perhaps enriched with a more explicit peace-dividend stance towards our existing military manufacturing capacity. “Exporting” the values of our “governance”, as it were, with every pump, windmill and turbine. 

This is Anholt’s and Adnan’s point: the most authentic brand impact and soft power of small nations comes from building on what an readily-informed world already recognises about them, not from pushing a brittle new image that can all-too-easily crumble under pressure. 

So we should be relaxed about kilts in Kiev (or for that matter, Braveheartish girls in forthcoming Pixar blockbusters). For all the angsting of the designer classes, there’s nothing much we can do about a’ that Tartanry. But what a “Yes” vote to independence does present is an opportunity to amplify and broaden Scotland’s story about our democratic processes, our social welcome and the beauty of our culture and environment. 

And from a soft power and nation-brand perspective, a positive and constructive discourse running up to the referendum would still seem to be the best way to go. What’s fascinating, from David Cameron’s most recent speech, is that the defenders of the Union are beginning to wake up to this too. Expect more love-bombs carpeting us all the way up to the vote - but for external as well as internal audiences. 

Pat Kane is one half of Hue And Cry, and hosts the Scottish ideas-blog Thoughtland (www.thoughtland.info) 

 

How much free publicity would Scottish independence be worth?

Pete Martin, creative director at Gate Worldwide, has done some rough calculations on how much free publicity from a “Yes” vote to independence would be worth, if we equated global tv news coverage with spending on television ads.

UK rates can be £5 per thousand viewers of a 30 second ad, and those in India and China around £2-3 (US rates can reach as high as £18 per thousand, for example during the SuperBowl). So let’s conservatively assume a median rate of £4 per 1000 viewers. The largest verifiable TV audience was the 1 billion who watched the Beijing Olympics: let’s take that number as the potential audience for news of an independent Scotland. 

If an incontrovertible “Yes” vote provoked a 5-minute news item in most global networks, that comprises ten thirty-second slots, worth £40 per thousand viewers. Presuming a billion-strong audience for the nightly news, the free publicity value for Scottish independence - calculated purely in terms of tv ads - comes out at £40 million. 

Martin estimates that press and online media coverage would easily be double that amount, bringing the free publicity benefit of independence to £80 million. And he also notes that in terms of impact, a positive story delivered through a trusted source like a news agency has much more social value than sheer advertising spend. And this is only relevant to the immediate reportage of the vote itself, missing out prior or subsequent coverage. 

Labour For Independence? Essay for The Scotsman

This is an essay the Scotsman commissioned me to do on the crazy-maybe-not-so crazy idea of a “Labour for Independence” campaign at the coming Independence Referendum in 2014. A bit of miscommunication meant that I originally wrote a much longer piece than has eventually appeared - the unedited version runs below, the edited version is here. 

I also received some excellent pre-publication responses from political commentator Gerry Hassan, and a new voice to Thoughtland - Cailean Gallagher, the young editor of the Oxford Left Review, who is (as far as I know) the only “out” Labour party member supporting independence. These are printed below the main piece. And of course, all comments (from all comrades!) welcome. 

Labour For Independence Isn’t Such a Mad Idea

Pat Kane, The Scotsman, Feb 9, 2012

Unedited version below (1763 words). Edited and published version (950 words) here. 

THE SCENE is the aftershow of a riotously joyful Celtic Connections gig. I have just met one of my oldest friends in the Scottish music scene - a great facilitator of the business of rock in this country for over thirty years. A smart, sophisticated man (he once included a book of Seamus Heaney poems in my dressing-room rider) we naturally fall to talking about politics. 

I’m surprised to find out that he describes himself as “virulently Labour”. How virulently? “I have to confess a terrible thing”, he says. While half-smeeked at a recent cultural opening, he tottered over to a notoriously sweet-natured Scottish Government minister and asked her, “you still a member of the Scottish Nazi Party?” 

It’s so ludicrous I have to laugh out loud. “But you see, I’m of that generation”, he explains. “Hate narrow nationalism. Closer to a worker in Liverpool than a laird in Ullapool. You cut me, I bleed Labour”. You’re a bit in trouble then in the old homeland, aren’t you? “You could say that”, he murmured, gripping his German beer. 

For those of us who would describe ourselves as “Scottish Left”, and who see independence as the most immediate lever to realise our values and visions, it’s chastening to come out of our echo chambers and hear just how subcutaneous some political identities are. I sent my friend scurrying off with the challenge, “Come on now! You should be starting Labour for Independence!” Out of the mouths of party-animals... 

Yet even as a piece of social-science fiction, it’s an interesting concept. Under what conditions - say, the next 24 months leading up to the most important political event in 300 years for Scotland - could a “Labour for Independence” exist? 

One basic argument for the existence of Labour for Independence is the need for strategic thinking about the party’s survival, if a majority for independence is achieved. If the current Scottish Labour leadership’s claim is sincerely held - that is, willing to serve Scotland, no matter the constitutional arrangement - then it seems somewhat reckless for the Scottish Labour movement not to develop some sense of their platform in a future independent country.

Many on the Scottish Left have given the SNP our crucial votes, regarding them as the main instrument towards achieving full sovereignty (though with the Greens, and in past years the ultra-left parties, as other options). 

But post the Great Day, would we necessarily wish to find ourselves with a “National Party of Scotland”, to quote Salmond’s words immediately after the May 2011 victory: a party fully vindicated in its mission, and awaiting a electoral mandate which might even extend (according to some recent polls) their current command of the Scottish polity?

I don’t question the talents, commitment and values of the SNP Cabinet, MSPs and wider membership. But one-party dominance would not be healthy for a newly independent country, which would need all available minds and talents on hand to steer us through the rapids of realpolitik, geopolitics and globalisation. 

Would Scottish Labour - or at least some significant chunk of it - really want to be on the sidelines at this vital moment? Despite the fury this would cause in the current leadership, would it not be prudent for some groupuscules in the People’s Party to start brewing up some wisdom, strategy and research around their post-independence existence? 

Of course, in an earlier, less acute stage of the “process-not-event” of Scottish self-determination, we have seen innovation of this kind from the Labour Party in Scotland. Jim Sillars famously broke off from being a hammer of the Nats to found the Scottish Labour Party, and thence to the SNP itself (his old compadre in the SLP, Alex Neil, is now a well-behaved Enterprise Minister for the Scottish Government). 

From the 80’s, the ginger-group Scottish Labour Action once contained both Wendy Alexander and Jack McConnell in its ranks. SLA produced confident pamphlets about Labour’s “home rule” traditions which envisaged much more “fiscal autonomy” than anything proposed by the Party at present. And of course, not forgetting the mavericks of old, like John McAllion, Dennis Canavan and (perhaps) Malcolm Chisholm, dormant volcanoes of “independent-mindedness” in the Scottish Labour party.

In this current vertiginous stage of the “process”, is Scottish Labour capable of the same kind of innovation? Certainly, if the Labour leadership line holds against constructing an answer to the SNP’s “Devo Max” proposition, Labour for Independence might become a necessity for some. 

UK Labour let the musculature of federalism go to waste in its 14-year Westminster dominance. They spurned the chance to cement a “progressive majority”, through a steady argument for PR with Lib-Dems as allies. This allowed the Orange Book Liberals to come through and get their sweaty palms on the reins of power. Salmond’s calculation may well be based on this historical failure. With Devo-Max, he’s offering the federal key to a pallid political constituency that can barely raise a trembling finger to respond.

Incidentally, constitutional literacy, and pluralist thinking, is not dead in the UK Labour Party. Compass - shaped by political guru Neal Lawson, who has invited me to speak at its London conferences many times - is the residue of an intelligent centre-left that reaches out to Greens, Scottish and Welsh nationalism, and the wetter Lib-Dems, in an organisation which is now open to non-Labour-Party members. But their presence in Scotland is barely established.

Thus we will witness the gory spectacle of Scottish Labour epigones sharing, or half-sharing, or phoning in that they’re sharing platforms with Westminster Coalition politicians. They will defend a “Union” which retains domestic and offensive nukes, which accepts spending cuts over capital investment and Keynesian stimulation, which is currently privatising and stratifying its health and education services in England... We can imagine the SNP’s gleeful framing of all this, and its brightly positive responses.

Does every member, and every MSP, in Scottish Labour really want to be lining up alongside the serried horrors of Westminster, associating themselves with an acid rain of negativity, fear-stories and condescension? Or might at least some of them want to argue a Labour case for independence which allows them to speak as the social-democrats, or democratic-socialists, they are in their hearts? 

I’m on the steering group of the Jimmy Reid Foundation precisely because, like its founder, it creates a space on the left in Scotland for economic equity and social justice that includes - or at least doesn’t exclude - the context of independence. Its first report on government procurement, written by SNP stalwarts and economists Jim and Margaret Cuthbert, is a perfect example of how an SNP government can find a “critical friend” in a Scottish Left, now fully alive to the possibilities of maximal self-determination. 

How do we assert a national economic interest over £9billion pounds worth of Scottish government expenditure? What’s the proper argument between “value for money” for the Scottish taxpayer (often returned via successful overseas bidders for Scottish contracts), and supporting indigenous enterprises - and what does that imply for the strategic usage of the economic powers of statehood?

The question of the demilitarisation of Scottish society - from nuclear missiles to Hamish Henderson’s “braggarts crousely crawing” - is something that has animated a Scottish Left for decades. Yet the highest of moral high-grounds in the national conversation is currently held by the SNP, in terms of its implacable opposition to Trident and its thoroughly non-adventurous conception of our “defence” forces.

Is every Labour supporter blithely happy to attack independence as a threat to our military-industrial (or even just military-employment) complex? In terms of the sheer difficulty and expense of relocating Trident from Coulport (as recently indicated by the Ministry of Defence), could not a hypothetical “Indy-Labour” support a “Yes” vote - as an instrument towards the removal of these weapons of mass destruction from these islands as a whole? And is there no appetite or ability to plan for “swords-into-ploughshares” left in the labour movement? 

When framed in an independence context, a few of Scottish Labour’s current policy positions begin to make at least some kind of sense. Their opposition to SNP plans to lower the rate of corporation tax rings hollow, if we think of Scottish Labour as part of the same party which rampantly deregulated finance in the City of London under Gordon Brown. 

But placed in an independence context, it starts a real debate about national economic strategy, one brought to a focus regularly over the years by the political scientist Micheal Keating. In his words from 2007, “An independent Scotland could thus be not only viable but successful, but only with structural change accompanying independence. One form would be the deregulated, low tax model, open to international business. Another would be a concerted and networks economy, with a stronger emphasis on public services and high-value activities. Little of this, however, features in the political debate.” 

Or to be precise, the SNP - in their public discourse at least -  try to transcend both forms: low-tax and pro-enterprise on one side, the “social wage” and the “commonweal” on the other. Can it really be done? We haven’t even touched the Greens’ critique of petro-fuelled growth in Scotland, solidly within the context of independence - that’s for another time. A proper left-green critique of the SNP’s macro-economics is required. But it won’t be remotely credible coming from a Scottish party so associated with the bubble-wrapped neo-liberalism of the New Labour years. 

However, a small sliver of that party - audibly imagining itself operating under independence, and bringing its positive, constructive visions of political economy to that society - might have a chance of being heard. They might also be the penicillin that keeps the Labour Party from expiring entirely in a post-independence Scotland.

Back at the rock’n’roll gig... I left my “cut-me-I-bleed-Labour” friend with a hug across his shoulders. We’ve worked together in this country for nearly a quarter of a century, and we’re certainly not going to let the difference between left-nationalist and democratic-socialist sully that in the slightest. 

“But promise me”, he pleaded at the last, “the SNP will disband as soon as they get independence, won’t they?” I doubt that very much, I answered. But for the health of the country, I hope that some in Scottish Labour are thinking about how they’ll cope, and maybe even thrive, in the early days of a fully sovereign nation. 

What makes for a "creative place" in Scotland? PK essay for Sunday Herald

I was asked to write an essay by my old paper The Sunday Herald about the idea of how you make a "creative place" in Scotland - extending and riffing on my experience as a judge for the Creative Places award for Creative Scotland, announced a few weeks ago. (Unedited version below). It was a nice opporunity to ruminate on my own relationship between creativity and place. I was delighted by the witty graphic on the left, which makes a limpid watercolour out of one of the architectural "carbuncles" that Coatbridge (my home town) is notorious for. 

How art can reinvent our towns

Sunday Herald "Essay of the Week", 29 January 2012

By Pat Kane

It was at the start of my jog, during a weekend visit to my mum, that I came upon the town's newest landmark: the Coatbridge Superhero Archway.

At the mouth of the Monklands Canal, two guys were bolting the cast-iron sculpture on to some old pillars. The arch depicts three masked and caped crusaders, surrounded by flora, fauna and the industrial workers of the town's past. On the way back, I ran down the old canal to the high street. What used to a be slalom ride of broken Buckfast bottles – the green, green glass of home – is now a veritable sculpture park. Witty, outsized objects, riffing on Coatbridge's heritage as the "Iron Burgh", open out into an amphitheatre that could (on that single day in June when the cloud breaks) be adequately described as Mediterranean.

And here, instead of lost, angry guys swaying and muttering their way home, there were clumps of Glee-like, floppy-fringed teenagers, using this stage to mount their squeaking, shrieking rehearsals for life.

For a town which won Carbuncle Of The Year in 2007, this has the makings of a municipal counter-attack. The superhero arch was inspired and supported by comic book and movie writer Mark Millar, a local lad done good. The sculpture promenade is a thematic extension of the Summerlee Heritage Museum, which elegantly frames a lost industrial past as well as any comparable institution.

There is one more unexpected glint of cultural gold I've discovered in my home town (apart from its reserves of excellent pop stars and unstoppable footballers). A very accomplished and influential mover in the Scottish arts establishment told me proudly that his child has just got into Coatbridge College's performing arts department – "he's delighted to be there, it's very highly rated". And on checking, so it proves (which might explain the Glee Kids down at the Canal). Who'd a thunk?

So does all this activity mean that Coatbridge might count as a "creative place"? I ask because I've just completed my judging duties on an awards scheme, begun by Creative Scotland this year, which aims to "celebrate and recognise the hard work and imagination that contributes to the rich cultural life of a community, as well as its social and economic wellbeing". It was a fascinating process, and a delight to meet the excited winners.

But it's made me think hard about how we might define a "creative place". Can creativity be conjured out of your fly-blown town by some adroit marketing and branding exercise? Is it right to place an expectation on parts of Scotland that might be doing their best to survive, that they find a way to make themselves sing and dance for passing tourists as well? Or is there something new here about finding untapped sources of optimism and energy in the country – rooted in local action and imagination, rather than the usual political flyting?

The Canadian economist Richard Florida has made a global career for himself by advocating a formula that "technology, talent and tolerance" is what's required to make your area "creative". Technology meaning a combination of networks and transport, allowing mobility and connectedness; talent meaning universities, start-up zones, cultural sectors; and tolerance meaning a willingness to accept bohemian, non-majority lifestyles, and thus the kind of personal eccentricity that drives innovation. (Florida is notorious for his "gay" index – the healthier your gay scene, usually the higher your creativity quotient). Florida's template has been criticised for its cookie-cutter approach: the unedifying spectacle of burghers scurrying around looking for their local "3Ts", then handing it over to a branding agency to polish up for the tourist/investment market.

The Creative Place Awards are a fascinating counter to the idea that there is a formula for civic creativity. If any finalist was close to Florida's 3Ts, it was Huntly – where its head (a German artist) had commissioned a South African artist to rebrand the market town, and whose vision for the moribund central square partly involved turning empty shopfronts into artistic installations.

Creetown, one of the category prizewinners, was also setting itself up as an "art town" – but the link seemed more integral: the local granite mines had attracted acclaimed Japanese sculptor Hideo Furuta, who then redesigned its Adamson Square into a beautiful swirl of grey, glittering carvings. Kilmartin House had built a steady visitor attraction from its neolithic remains, but Prestonpans took the model of a not-for-profit community pub as the basis for its artistic programme. Another category winner, Wigtown, was making the most of the current appetite for readers and writers to find themselves in congenial places, the better to contemplate ideas and experiences away from the digital chatter.

Did St Andrews – which probably fits most of Florida's categories already – really need to be awarded its category winner prize (towns with a 100,000-plus population), even given its plans were by far the more developed and ambitious? This is perhaps a flaw in the Creative Place approach that needs to be addressed: the extent to which localities can even get to the starting gate of effectively promoting their "creativity" to funding agencies. Those which already have more cultural capital and confidence will be able to make a much more fluent case than those at the hard-scrabble end of Scottish life.

AT the end of the ceremony, I sensed that Andrew Dixon, head of Creative Scotland, had registered this problem – putting a call out to places like Raploch in Stirling (home of the El Sistema/Big Noise project, otherwise losing its funding this year) or areas in Glasgow such as Govan.

Yet his other prompts – to Ullapool, a centre for ideas driven by the energies of new MSP Jean Urqhuart, or to Skye, with its Gaelic College and other festivals – recognises that Scotland might have a particular answer to the "creativity" question: one that comes from the way that island or rural communities draw from language or landscape, as much as from post-industrial communities grappling with their heritage and legacy.

At the ceremony, I couldn't help quoting the famous MacDiarmid lines: "Scotland small? Our infinite, multiform Scotland small?" But I also recalled what the Channel 4 executive Stuart Cosgrove said when I asked him why he was buying a house in Glasgow's Dennistoun: "Because there's a thousand stories in every street." In his 1990s C4 show Halfway To Paradise and his obsessional football broadcasts, Cosgrove exemplifies that approach to Scottish contemporary life that looks for the beauty, the intensity and even the globality in the local.

In a Scotland about to stop the world and get on, we should be looking for ways that the vapours of self-confidence and optimism billowing from political leaders can suffuse every corner of Scottish society. Articulating your local story, and then using that as a resource for all kinds of enterprise – not just cultural and artistic – could be one obvious way to do that.

Yes, tourism is one part of the equation, though the exact nature of the tourist market you seek determines how you tell that story. The “internal” tourist - buying Pete Irvine’s Scotland The Best or reading Scottish quality papers, perhaps in futures years benefitting from an education in Scottish studies, keen to test Macdiarmid’s fractal notion of the country - will be alive to ersatz hype of all kinds. 

The virtuous circle, for the tourist industry, is that an exacting internal market will provide the kinds of inimitable experiences sought by high-end cultural tourists from around the world. All those “Rough Guide” buyers and “Wallpaper” readers (or their European and American equivalents), keen to return to the metropolitan home with treasured narratives of the rich Caledonian lifestyle. 

Yet why should we read "creativity" as meaning only arts, culture and media? The director of West Kilbride's Craft Town Scotland, one of the Creative Place winners, told me with some pride that they were already a "Transition Town". The Transition Towns movement – comprising 700 places in 35 countries, adhering to shared practices of sustainability – is an example of how the doughty issue of low-carbon living can come alive, as a friendly day-to-day experience.

Its founder, Rob Hopkins, is quite explicit that one of the principles of Transition – apart from building up the resilience and self-sustaining nature of communities, and keeping their supplies as local as possible – is what he calls "inner" transition. People need an "engaged optimism", aroused by acting in concert with their neighbours, to defy hard times.

In Hopkins' words, "playfulness, creativity and happiness" are key. The ends of a Transition Town might be to get off the treadmill of growth: but the means are carnivals, festivals, galumphing great local initiatives, using all the tools of arts and culture to incite involvement and commitment.

West Kilbride's winning offer was due to its explicit vision about the role of "makers" as central to the wellbeing of communities. Makers is a broad new term from the US, celebrating the power of craft across arts, technology and the trades. (It could easily trace its origin to Scots: we call our poets "makars", a word close to the Greek root of poetry, poiesis, meaning an act of creation).

It was genuinely exciting to hear Crafttown's director, Maggie Broadley, enthuse about a new kind of "makerism" – putting technical apprentices, artistic producers and older mentors from other industrial eras into the same creative places.

We hear politicians' abstract words about the "reindustrialisation of Scotland" in a green economy. But initiatives like Crafttown start to herald a new popular culture of ingenuity and daily enterprise in Scotland, which creates a seedbed for sustainable living, via an active, skill-oriented pursuit of wellbeing. This vision of "creativity" moves beyond the arts-media definition, into something like the basic human energy of a nation.

Yet my mind drifts back to my own experiences of place and creativity, and for some reason, it drifts to Girvan. Like many Coatbridgeans in their late 40s, my memory of the Scottish seaside town is full of bitter-sweetness. I shared with a graphic designer friend of mine an obsession about Girvan for a while – not just because of the smelly motorised boats that went round its concrete pond, but its 1972 commissioning of Keith Albarn (cybernetic artist and father of Damon) to build a psychedelic palace called the 5th Dimension (a kind of fairground ride for the mind) on its seafront.

I'm convinced that a large chunk of my imaginative development began with me clambering around this unreal structure as a child. If anything is worth a retro reconstruction, it's the 5th Dimension. (It also shows that Scottish localities reaching out for cosmopolitan artists is nothing new). But it's an example that proves why the current "creativity" of any place should begin through a recall of the "creativity" that already exists there.

How many stories can we excavate, and perhaps generate, from the massive commitment to pleasure and freedom that the Scottish seaside town represents? Their current travails – in terms of poor employment and drugs cultures – are well known. But anyone who visits them, after they fight back their nostalgic disappointment, can see what a stage they could be for the imagination.

One element of Florida's mantra – "it's not new malls with high rents that support creativity, but old buildings with cheap rents" – applies directly to the Scottish seaside town. What could bohos and makers bring to these places? What would it take to drape a string of Brightons down Scotland's coasts?

YET when it comes to my home town, I have to admit that the very idea of Coatbridge even being able to make an argument for itself as a "creative place" has its own poignancy. As a teenager, I found creative enclaves there, for sure: a local library teeming with European and American modernist literature; a school drama department; English teachers, who responded to my expressive hunger; and later, the Masonic halls and local pubs that would allow spotty musicians to mess about for hours.

But I can't deny that much of this occurred in a mild warzone of tall poppy-cutting – where sports were the only cultural expression worthy of a young man; where deviance from the herd was a kind of punishment in advance, for those not wishing to submit to the managed life.

So you explode out of that environment – to Glasgow, its universities, London and then the world (of ideas and of cities) – driven by the desire to shake off the shackles. But that explosion has its own psychological costs and pathologies; and over the years, you find out how many other interesting, idiosyncratic friends simply didn't have the willpower to break away as freely as you did.

The idea that something like Creative Places – or indeed, the whole approach of a Creative Scotland – mollycoddles people into creativity that it creates an extended kindergarten that protects the real artist from struggle, or the need for do-or-die commitment ... Well, it's a soundbite.

But it's possible to be in a historical moment where all the boats of human potential rise together – if we find ourselves with enough collective will, and the right tools to hand. Let's be patient with a good big idea, integrative and sustaining, when it arises.

The standard Scottish snarl would be that schemes like this are bourgeois-bohemian jobs for the bourgeois-bohemian girls and boys: we should subject them to the X-rays of money and power analysis, and find them wanting. Alternatively, maybe this drawing-together of the dots of Scottish social potential is exactly the kind of native innovation we always thought a more autonomous Scotland would be all about. Sometimes, just sometimes, we are the answer to our own prayers.

And in a personal spirit of reconciliation, I urge the good burghers of Coatbridge to get their act together as a Creative Place for next year. With all due respect, it's about time.

Pat Kane is one half of Hue And Cry, whose new album, Hot Wire, is out in March. His forthcoming book is Radical Animal www.radicalanimal.net

Scotland 2012: Educating For Independence

Some Ne'erday thoughts on politics in 2012. All comments welcome. (I will be hyperlinking references in this piece over the next few days). 

* * *

We hear that a "prospectus" for the independence option in the referendum is being prepared in the bowels of the SNP - a "little blue-and-white book" which will provide a coherent policy framework, for citizens considering what will probably be the biggest political decision of their lives. 

Quite a few columnists have been noting with wry interest how the year's end has brought what seems like the UK establishment's praise of Alex Salmond, as a major political figure on these islands (eg, The Times' "Briton of the Year"). In a gripping stretch of realpolitik, the Labour activist Ian S Smart wonders whether this is an "Ally's Army" episode - the UK building us up for a world-changing moment, ready to catch us in their Unionist embrace as we inevitably fall short of our ideal and reject independence, leaving a quiescent, depressed and tractable Scotland. 

Yet isn't it equally possible that a properly-bolted-together prospectus for independence would be one of the more significant cultural "memes" of the next 18 months - one which might reverberate beyond the London media, and become part of a global conversation about democracy and self-determination? Debate about the independence process often talks about the significant "holes" in the SNP's position. As a Unionist tactician, Smart is clear as a bell about how to exploit them. For him, it's only the threat that independence will disrupt the continuity of pensions or welfare benefits, of access to BBC shows or easy financial transactions across the border, that's needed to secure a clear majority against. 

Yet perhaps there's a much "higher road" than one where focus groups can be negatively targeted with, in Smart's words, "frightening effectiveness". There's an old saying in Scottish politics about never underestimating the intelligence of the Scottish electorate. Surely some of those smarts come from living through a period where the constitutional question has, at the very least, inserted an awareness of how governance, at a macro-level, matters to the everyday person. Two effective SNP administrations at Holyrood have made that manifest, through a range of tangible policy differences in education, health and local taxation. 

Perhaps we should remind ourselves that Scottish citizens have a level of political awareness which is more acute and lively than in other parts of the island. So the challenge for independistas in 2012 is not to nervously huddle around an obdurate minority in the opinion polls for independence, but to intellectually and rhetorically "work as if they were in the early days of an independent nation", to misquote Alasdair Gray. That is, to stretch and develop their existing understanding of the possible powers of a Scottish Parliament, making concrete and clear what extra benefits (and defences against Tory-Coalition policies) come from statehood. 

I think one of the tipping points will be a context in which a Eurosceptic majority looks like solidifying in the English polity and returning a right-wing, small-government Tory regime (perhaps earlier than expected). Against that, I'm sure it's possible to present a joined-up welfare-pensions-and-taxation framework for independence which will look more attractive, even more stable, than a status quo which leaves some of these services and functions to a regime which is fundamentally opposed to concepts such as "the social wage" or "social democracy". 

An England spiralling into isolationism will also leave headroom for the SNP's development of their diplomatic and geo-political arguments. A real educational achievement in the popular consciousness for independence would be an awareness that a Scottish state, if democratically mandated, would have the right and the ability to situate itself, in a tailored and unique way, amidst European and global political and economic frameworks. If the debate over the border escalates into an near-referendum moment on whether the UK should remain within Europe under current terms at all, would that allow the Scottish electorate to vote for the pragmatism of keeping international options open, both in a Nordic and a EU direction, in a situation of upheaval and chaos? 

Jim Sillars' request that Scots (politicians and citizens) start "thinking like a state" has never been more pertinent - however much I might dissent from details of his analysis. And there are aspects of that state-thinking in the coming "prospectus" which I will probably object to strongly. For all Angus Robertson's character as an individual, I profoundly disagree with his discourse around Scottish armed forces under independence. We need much less of the "our-fair-share-of-the-military-spending" rhetoric, and much more vision about the changed culture of a "Scottish Defence Force" - a clear sense of different priorities about participation in future interventions and peace-keeping, a background recognition that the "great traditions" of Scottish regiments should not be so blithely celebrated. Freedom Come 'A Ye, over Scotland The Brave. 

I will also probably be unhappy with any kind of "continuity plan" for broadcasting and media regulation, involving BBC Scotland having greater autonomy under independence (while retaining its title and general programming). I don't believe it's beyond the wit of independence policy-makers to sketch out a future where access to beloved programmes is guaranteed, in a time-shifting and digital multi-channel environment, but where the name-change to an "SBC" or some other title signifies the same shift in seriousness as "Scottish Executive" to "Scottish Government". That is, a Scottish "state" broadcasting service which (of course) parallels the BBC in its constitutional distance from political control, but which at least accepts - as the current BBC Scotland essentially cannot - the basic legitimacy of a Scottish state perspective. Meaning less Central Belt murr-durrs on the nightly news bulletin, and more coverage of a Scotland that will exists in the world of globalisation, and covers the complexities of national progress within that. And much more besides, in terms of the cultural, social, energy and business agenda.

But all that aside... If we can seize 2012 as the year of "education towards independence", I think Comrade Smart's sophisticated but depressive view of the insubstantial nature of Scottish political will for independence can be overturned. If he's right about the "Devo Max" option being a non-starter for the Unionist parties - which remains to be seen, and that's another post - then an independence movement has a clear run at a prospect which only asks us to be at our best, as persuaders, thinkers, tactitians and activists. In a world where there are enough grand narratives of despair available, we should enjoy the opportunity to argue for a tangible achievement of progress and modernity. 

For 'a that, and 'a that, it's comin' yet... 

Statehood a matter of poetic justice: my Scotsman essay on artists and independence

I've written this Perspective piece for the Scotsman today, on the interesting tensions (and affinities) between the coming "independence" referendum, and the arts-and-creative community in Scotland. The unedited version runs below. All comments welcomed. 

Note: I got it wrong in the original piece about Annie Lennox being opposed to Nationalism in general - it seems she's come out as a supporter of Scottish independence in the past. Sorry to Annie (and indepdendistas!) 

Statehood a matter of poetic justice

Edwin Morgan's posthumous donation to the SNP fed into what can be seen as a growing momentum towards greater self-empowerment

By Pat Kane

The Scotsman, Tuesday 15 November 2011

That terrifying old volcano, Hugh Macdiarmid, once wrote a poem about an alternative, super-cosmopolitan Glasgow - where paperboys ran around with special evening editions titled Turkish Poet’s Abstruse New Song: Scottish Author’s Opinions. “And, holy snakes, I saw the edition sell like hotcakes!”

Irony noted, Mr Grieve. But is it any likelier that a gay, Glaswegian, modernist-futurist poet - if not a translator of Turkish abstruseness, then certainly of Hungarian, Russian, Portuguese and German - would bequeath nearly a million pounds to fund a campaign for Scottish independence in a coming referendum?

Even if you’d scripted it direct from Alex Salmond’s laptop, you couldn’t have a more resonant challenge to the artistic and creative classes of Scotland to put themselves on the line, than Edwin Morgan’s posthumous donation to the SNP. Morgan's successor as the nation's Makar, Liz Lochhead, has also recently declared her explicit preference for an independence vote in the coming referendum. If these national embodiments of pluralism,diversity and experiment are willing to nail their reputations to the mast of a sovereign Scottish state...well, what better justification would any other creative type need? 

Of course, the sound you’ll now hear is that of a thousand creatives scattering to the corners of their cafe-bars, Groucho Marxists to a man and woman, refusing to be part of any club that compels them to join. And quite rightly too. Just as Norman McCaig asked that we “observe two minutes pandaemonium” to mark the birth of Macdiarmid, we should expect only dissensus from any artistic community worth its name in Scotland.

As the chairman who bridged the gap between the old Scottish Arts Council and the new Creative Scotland, Richard Holloway’s parting shot was an essay titled "Creative Disloyalty". In its closing words, Holloway asked for “vigilance in protecting the spiritual integrity of Scotland’s makers, including their ancient right to bite the hands that feed them...We willnever forget Graham Greene’s admonition that disloyalty is the primary virtue of the artist. If we can all learn to live within that tension without trying to resolve it, then Scotland will have become a truly creative nation”.

Militant eclecticism is easy to find in Scotland’s existing cultural landscape - the near-random musical associations of Celtic Connections, the film and book festivals across our cities that sample primarily from the international circuit, never mind the long-standing global networks that feed into contemporary art, or the Edinburgh Festivals.

Even our new National Theatre of Scotland is more like a constitution than an institution - a generous theatrical process that insinuates itself into various aspects of Scottish life, rather than a company-in-a-building dedicated to curating a national canon of works. And when esteemed figures like the historian and diplomat Paul M. Scott decide to object to that very amorphousness, the response is to bring him into a discussion space with NTS stalwart David Greig, under the ambiguous headline “Staging the Nation”.

How much of national identity is a stage-act, a confidence trick, a community imagined from the footlights? And if so, does that matter, as long as the effect is to raise wellbeing and general happiness? Surf through the rapidly maturing Scottish cultural blogosphere, and you’ll find such questions being raised, countered, complexified, at a much quicker pace than the publication of unpurchased journals in arts-venue bookshops.

The tumult of Scottish culture, as it relates to the stern imperatives of national progress, is like the way play functions for complex mammals. Both are rehearsal spaces for possible futures; both are zones of experimentation that help sharpen our responses to challenges and trials.

No matter who actually coined (or used) the phrase, we have an understanding that Scotland’s political state is “a process, not an event”. Part of what keeps it processual is the unpredictable, unbiddable nature of Scottish arts and letters.

And yet, if it’s truly unpredictable and open, then it’s also possible that some figures - like Morgan & Lochhead - might well choose to arrest the beguiling flow of their art, and make a concrete public commitment to a political or constitutional option. The interesting question is who captures the value of those commitments - and how subtly.

In the SNP’s “impossible” electoral majority of earlier this year, one evident factor was the sophistication of their media and cultural strategy. Their use of endorsements from celebrities, artists and notable public figures wasn’t just about borrowing their high-wattage power - showbusiness for beautiful people gracing showbusiness for ugly people.

Much more important was the way they regularly told a story of changing their vote from Labour to SNP - a story draped with the emotive language of disillusion, regret, commitment and relief. On an overall level, this helped to legitimate the feelings of switch voters - already specified issue by issue, and demographic group by group, by the SNP’s Activate software.

Was this some fiendish, white-cat-stroking psychological masterplan,political marketers deploying tractable Scotterati like pieces on a chessboard? Some figures (the present writer included) have been on the independence bus for decades. But for some others - like actor Brian Cox, who has previously voiced Labour party political broadcasts - the moment of conversion was thrawn and deeply considered. Some, like comix writer Mark Miller and actor Alan Cumming, were complete surprises to the SNP, recording their own video tributes and giving them to the party.

So yes, cultural figures were one of the “verticals” - including fiscal-autonomy-loving businessmen, or farmers, or new-build homeowners - that were stacked up in favour of an SNP victory. (There was a wide spread of artist endorsement, with understandable self-interest, for the creation of a Scottish Digital Network - itself a cross-Holyrood commitment).

Again, the idea that they were mere code in any party's  programming of the electoral mind would make the support of any “creatively disloyal” Scottish artist melt away like snow off a dyke. But there are signs that this support is coming up from the creative grassroots in any case, looking for a home in the next great political contest of the independence referendum.

Particularly indicative was an post-election article in a London-based Sunday newspaper, who decided to commission pieces from five Scottish writers about the Union. Without apparent coordination or planning, four out of the five (Iain Banks, A.L. Kennedy, Janice Galloway and David Greig) recapitulated the “Labour to SNP”/ “Union to Independence” narrative almost perfectly.

Yet, as one might expect from a page full of expert human observers, the dominant metaphor was complex and personal: that of sad but adult partners, ruefully accepting their rocky history and impending separation, hoping for less fractious and more constructive times ahead.

There is something qualitative, specific and nuanced about these accounts that points towards the real power of Scottish arts in this coming referendum. It wouldn’t be hard to assemble a tick-list of prominent cultural Scots - say, Billy Connolly, Ewan McGregor, J.K. Rowling, Robbie Coltrane - whose previously-voiced discomforts with “nationalism”, Scottish or otherwise, might make them a target for recruitment in a “No/Pro-UK” campaign.

Yet would any of these figures, or others waiting in the sidelines, be willing to be used in a populist, headline-banner way to stand in the way of Scottish progress towards more self-empowerment?

In my last incarnation as a political activist, in 1992, we formed a group with the unequivocal title of Artists for Independence - but which nevertheless expressed that desire in the form of a “multi-option referendum”. We figured, in our incorrigibly artistic way, that the only way to answer the question was to give the people a set of rich democratic options, and let them decide the future of their country.

It looks like we’re about to have the subtle democratic process we dreamed of twenty years ago - too subtle for its own good, some might say (and in a sweaty moment, I might agree with them). Within that framework, then as now, my argument would be for clear nation-state independence. But any creative, at some point, has to realise that there are deeper tendencies flooding through them and their work than they can consciously grasp.

In his great poem introducing the Parliament, Edwin Morgan voices the people’s desire for our politicians to be “thinking persons, as open and adventurous as its architecture”. Artists should be intrinsically happy with the open and adventurous. But our task in this moment might be as much to keep profoundly blethering, telling stories, exploring stubborn details, wildly going over the score in all directions: a commitment to enrich imaginations, as much as imagine rich nations. And of course, hoping that all our editions, however abstruse, keep selling like hotcakes.

Pat Kane on The Steamie: Ancien Regime meets Salmond's Juggernaut of Joy

This is my first blog to be reposted on The Steamie, the Scotsman's political comment forum. All comments welcome

Pat Kane: Ancien regime meets Salmond's Juggernaut of Joy 

Extraordinary times, which drive even the most immersed book-writer to his keyboard. We might be seriously facing a scenario within the next few years, sketched out by Gerry Hassan in his recent article in Open Democracy, where a Eurosceptic Tory party forces a referendum on the UK's relationship to Europe - and a coherent, democratically-mandated SNP runs a referendum that promises to realise the "Independence in Europe" dreams of the last 30 years. 

It matters a bit which referendum comes first - but certainly, the prospect of an RUK/England wriggling free of the next round of Euro-integration will be enough to bring an extra dimension of worldliness to the independence case in Scotland. Winnie Ewing's fantastic old one-liner "stop the world, we want to get on", might finally connect with the hearts and minds of a Scottish majority. 

What's also fascinating me is the deep tactics of the SNP's inner core around the referendum questions. Watching the three Scottish Labour leader candidates on BBC's Politics Show on Sunday, I had a real sense of them walking blindly into a bear trap. Each one of them sang in unison about the "Devo Max" option being a Nationalist ruse - a way to get increased powers for the Scottish Parliament no matter what the vote, indicating the SNP's fundamental insecurity about the possibility of securing a majority for independence. 

It's likely that all the Unionist parties will fall in line with a critique of Devo Max as an SNP fudge (even Murdo Fraser and his re-branded McTory vision seems to be reverting to type), and push for a single-vote referendum on independence. This will allow Salmond to portray them as unwilling to grant a range of sensible, widely-approved extra powers (such as fiscal autonomy and the Crown Estate) to Holyrood.

But you guess Alec knew this would happen all along. Look at the pitiful spectacle of the AV campaign, rooted in the cross-party turpitude on non-Celtic constitutional change that characterised the New Labour era. You wouldn't need to be a genius to conclude that the Unionist parties would be utterly incapable of a "federal" response to the SNP's demands. Remember Salmond's post-UK General Election call to make up a "progressive" Rainbow coalition? That was undoubtedly another marker put down to indicate the SNP's democratic generosity towards political affairs on these islands. Eck plays a long, subterranean game. 

And in the meantime, the SNP's Juggernaut of Joy rumbles out of its hangar again, with its databases and sentiment management systems, its army of activists and its mastery of the big cultural narratives. The aim, like 2011, will be to corral as much of the nation's cognitive and emotional mindspace as possible, and steer it towards the hopeful, can-do, progress-oriented prospect of a prosperous, secure independence: Scotland Forward, indeed (or #scotfwd, as it will reverberate round Twitter). 

"Nae Limits", "Scotland: it's Starting". The appeal to a shining, inspiring horizon, using local and familiar language, is what cognitive scientists like George Lakoff and Mark Westen would called "priming", "framing" and "embodiment". It's of course entirely possible that the Unionists will realise the nature of the consciousness-politics that the SNP is practising, and try to build up their own Juggernaut of Joy. 

But as comrade Hassan often says, where is the energy in the Unionist argument? The sheer instability of the Coalition, the cross-ideological disgruntlement of middle-England with their status in the world (evidenced by Euro-phobia and immigration-scepticism), the hapless nature of the UK Labour leadership (never mind the nativising of the Scottish Labour Party)... Would even the massed celebrity ranks of Ewan McGregor, Billy Connolly and Annie Lennox be enough to make the emotional case for Scotland in the Union? 

In their best lights, the SNP have a case to make about independence as the eventual achievement of political and economic modernity in Scotland: the expertise, values, traditions and resources of the country finally getting their appropriate and effective structures of power and democracy. That was the case, articulated by Jim Sillars in the mid 80's, that brought this particular Labour die-hard into the independence fold. But it seems as if the ancien regime is accomodating the vision, by crumbling to pieces around about us. 

SLR essay: Beyond “Alienation”: the need for a new political economy of wellbeing and sustainability in Scotland

This is an essay I wrote for the Scottish Left Review, celebrating the launch of their think-tank The Reid Foundation, and suggesting some research agendas for it. All comments welcome. 

Beyond “Alienation”: the need for a new political economy of wellbeing and sustainability in Scotland

Pat Kane

The argument for shorter working hours is as old as the labour movement itself. Jimmy Reid’s Glasgow University Rectorial speech on “Alienation”, first delivered in 1971, restated the credo. It’s worth quoting at length:  

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.

The crucial point is “full employment”. One of the ways enterprises seek ever greater returns on capital is by deployment of ever-more-efficient technologies and working practices - usually implying the shedding of labour. So Jimmy presumed a management of capitalism (no doubt with labour unions in their full pomp) where a smaller number of organisations transform productive efficiencies into free-time for workers - rather than a mad scramble of many enterprises, seizing new tools and deploying workers variably, to sell stuff and services to disatissfied consumers. 

Does the second scenario sound familiar? And let’s not even factor in how much, since the early 70’s, media and marketing has played its role in the psychic scrambling of the kind of collective purpose represented by the UCS work-in. 

Yet even as the old Marxist axioms presently haunt Western establishments - with orthodox financial experts like Nouriel Roubini saying “Marx was right” in predicting that capitalism can choke itself to death, in its current shift of income from labour to capital - there is a problem in returning to classic socialist analysis. It’s implied by Jimmy’s quote above - his noble presumption that “the creative use of leisure”, informed and structured by what we’d call in the Scottish tradition a “democratic intellectualism”, is where a fully empowered working-class would head. 

In the modern Scotland of ubiquitous retail, car sovereignty and the celebritarian obsessions of the tabloids, one might at least suggest that Jimmy’s road to the art of living well has not been too enthusiastically taken - perhaps as the toxic consequence of exactly that “alienation” from a sense of agency and self-determination that his great essay outlined. So how do Scots leap out of that trap? What can damp down the fires of work-to-hyper-consume that has been the sociological motor, at least, of our current financial crisis? What could pull Scots towards valuing “leisure time”, in Jimmy’s words, rather than mall-time, as a consequence of a progressing society? 

I think we have a latent “big narrative” in Scotland for the kind of shift towards shorter working hours that Jimmy Reid saw as the consequence of a truly socialised country. But we have to piece it together, from old and new elements. 

One new element since the 70’s would have to be the planetary limits revealed by anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. We are assailed every week by new images of our climate becoming ever more unpredictable and destructive - some far off (Australian fires and Japanese tsnamis), some close to home (the next village flooding scare).

I’m writing a book on innovation and sustainabilty at the moment called Radical Animal: innovation, sustainability and human nature. Many of the climate gurus I’m reading say that our weather instability will only increase if we don’t find a way to massive reduce the amount of planet-warming carbon spewed into our atmosphere, from our use of fossil fuels for energy and production. That means, to some extend, addressing our consumerist, stuff-spewing society - which then addresses our need for the kind of jobs that will give us sufficient disposable income to participate in the melee. 

Tim Jackson, the recently deposed head of the disbanded Commission on Sustainable Development, has some brilliant ideas in his book Prosperity Without Growth - and one of them is to look at a wholesale and managed reduction in working hours.

For him, this is a quality-of-life “win-win”. Reduced economic activity overall reduces our carbon footprint (this has been measured in recessions). But more free-time in all of our lives gives us the zone to do some essential repair work on, and also spark some invention with, the important relationships in our lives. It’s these relationship - with partners, family, community, peers, hobbyists, creative collaborators - that the “happiness” science of figures like Richard Layard tell us, is what brings us lasting happiness (beyond a certain level of income). 

Jackson asks us to think about the etymology of “prosperity” - rooted in the idea of “hopefulness” - and substitute a narrative of hopefulness for a narrative of material wealth. “Flourishing” is the other term that thinkers in the field of well-being regularly use, coming from the work of Amartya Sen and Martin Seligman: individuals and communities energetically growing and developing along a number of indicators, not just monetary or economic. 

Much of the wellbeing research asks us to shift our basic understanding of human nature from homo/femina economicus (selfish maximisers of utility) to homo/femina socius (communally-interested empaths), based on much new social and mind science (Yochai Benkler’s The Penguin and the Leviathan is the coming and definitive work on this).

If we accept this science, then we can presume a few things about what Scots would do with their extra hours - which is that they will reach for pro-community and pro-flourishing activities, rather than, say, more Sky Sports 1. In themselves, this will reduce indice of “ill-being” (our parlous and interconnected health stats), and consequently reduce pressure on the welfare state to expensively bind together the walking wounded (which will be necessary if revenues from a steady-state economy stop growing). 

The green movement’s UK think-tank the New Economics Foundation has a whole vision - encapsulated in their Great Transition research theme - for a “bigger society” where we have the time and support to co-produce, and participate in, the services that constitute a healthy, meaningful life.

One clear agenda for the Reid Foundation is to “put a kilt” on some of this research and these paradigms. But just as importantly, we have to connect the best in sustainable-lifestyle thinking to native enterprises and traditions. For one thing, as the endeavours of people like Mike Small around food production and consumption (the Fife Diet), or Andy Wightman and Lesley Riddoch in land reform and community empowerment show, we already have a vitality of practice around sustainable living. 

The grander prize - with an independence referendum promising (to a greater or lesser extent) a step-change in the powers of governance - is to align national ambitions for a shift towards “green production”, with a progressive “green lifestyle” also. It seems incoherent to argue for the “re-industrialisation of Scotland” on the basis of renewable energy and other green systems, if the consequence of that level of employment is spending patterns that fuels the same-old go-go consumerist retail culture. 

Tim Jackson argues that we need to shift patterns of investment at a macro-economic level - an arrangement which could support a properly sustainable society, pushing flows of investment capital in a much more long-term and pro-social direction (with a regulation of the labour market to reduce working hours being one of those tools). 

One more research topic for the Reid Foundation would certainly be, again, to “Tartanise” this debate about the proper macro-economic framework for a sustainable independent Scottish state. For example, is a beggar-thy-neighbour approach to corporation tax, as promoted by Salmond and many business supporters, really the appropriate instrument for sustainability? What exactly should be done with a “military dividend” from leaving the Union, for example, in terms of infrastructure development?  

The Left-Greens in Scotland need to step up to the moment of the independence referendum, and begin to do serious work on a new political economy of sustainability and wellbeing. There is a plethora of available intellectual tools and research precedents lying around. If we have institutional support to do this - beyond the fitful and donatory labours of the blogosphere, and not waiting for the sluggish response of Scottish academia - we should proceed immediately.

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.

* * *

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.

Scotsman essay: We need a new Scottish eco-lifestyle

This is the unedited version of my essay in The Scotsman, 15 July 2011, titled "Difficult to buy into the good life". It's the core argument from my forthcoming book Radical Animal, put into a Scottish context. All comments more than welcome. 

* * *

We live in a strange news landscape in Scotland. At one level the story is cuts, austerity and threats to public services, at another an aspiration to a more empowered nation that can grasp new levers of growth and prosperity. And sitting between the two, always awkwardly, is Scotland's environmental agenda.

We are pulled one way by Greens who warn of our heedless approach to material consumption, another pulled another way by parties (not just the SNP) who see renewable energy as the great "reindustrialisation of Scotland". How can the same agenda both call for strict limits to personal lifestyle, and offer a new age of unlimited prosperity?

The great unanswered question is the degree to which we deal with the "demand" side of low-carbon living, as much as the "supply" side (the production of clean and renewable energy). How far can the Scottish lifestyle - in many realms, no less hyper-consumerist than any other part of the West - change to meet the challenge of climate crisis?

At the same time, how do we answer our deep human appetite for spectacle, sensuality and novelty, without our lust for stuff crisping the planet? How do we shift and change our psychic investment in lifestyle consumerism, in order that we can reduce the material throughputs that exacerbate global warming?

There is a growing realisation that we cannot adequately respond to the challenges of climate change without a new and better understanding of human nature. At the moment, many Western governments are trying to use the insights of behavioural economics to "nudge" and "steer" citizens towards sustainable living.

They make policy in the light of our inner "Homer Simpson" - an understand of humans as short-termist, reputation-obsessed naked apes. And as good "liberal paternalists", they gently take us in hand to lead us towards the environmental life, through stealth legislation and marketing aimed at making green lifestyle a status aspiration.

But such campaigns confront a general scepticism about politics and policy. Once the citizens have rumbled that they're being nudged or steered, the cry of "nanny state" or "climate conspiracy" can soon rise up - easily resulting in popular and irrational resistance to any kind of change. See the Tea Party movement in the US, or the legions of petrolheads in the UK that drive Jeremy Clarkson's reactionary productions to the top of the charts

In Scotland, there may not be quite the same depth of scepticism about political intentions as elsewhere. We have just resoundingly elected a Scottish Parliament for whom sustainability is a national ambition, allied to world-leading environmental targets for society and economy. The governmental cues for a green Scotland hardly need to be cautious, stealthy "nudges", when the popular vote for a direction of travel was so clear.

Scotland also has a rich history of environmental experiments in living - from Findhorn to the Fife Diet, from the crofting revival to wind-and-wave powered island communities like Islay. And despite the justifiable complaints from Greens about its fervour for road-building, the SNP government has enough environmental vision to seek to scale-up the best of such experiments to the level of national policy.

But let's not kid ourselves, or get too Caledonian-smug. At present, the broad middle of Scottish socio-economic life is locked into a high-consumption, trend-driven capitalism. Just look at the adverts that comprise a core revenue stream for much commercial media in this country. They fall into predictable categories - consumer electronics, holidays, financial services, furniture, cars.

What's the lifestyle that results from these seductive appeals? We keep buying essentially the same arrangements of metal, fabric and plastic - which deliver incremental improvements in performance and efficiency, but which hardly demand a whole new production cycle to be delivered.

We scout around for the financial credit needed to purchase and house this stuff, being urged back into the debt holes that we know nearly sunk our economy three years ago. And once the strain of working-to-consume gets too overwhelming, we briefly escape to foreign climes, in a boozy blur of intense, compensatory hedonism, usually completely heedless about the environmental externalities of our actions.

Many green thinkers would line up behind Professor Tim Jackson's attempt to nail this self-defeating (and globally-destructive) life-style loop in a one-liner: "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." This is the negative case for how our current consumer lifestyles alienate us from our authentic, flourishing selves.

The positive case, one assumes, would be to spend money we had, on things we needed, to make impressions that lasted, on people we cared about. How attainable is this mentality and lifestyle? This is where an ingenuity gap opens up, sitting between all the major contenders for changing our behaviours in a green direction.

The green lifestyle experimentalists could justifiably claim they were largely already there. They emphasize community and locality, reinforced by much consultation and democratic process. This ensures that people's words and actions make the desired "impression" on those they "care" about, via a satisfying and active civic life.

The idea of resilience - where the skills and craft required to maintain the health of a community lie very much within that community - brings money, and needs, closer together. Repair - and repairable, durable design - becomes more important than gadget lust. Unique, idiosyncratic services and products, well and passionately made, become an occasion for necessary consumption, rather than a therapeutic splurge at the mega-mall. And never mind the rise of sheer barter and mutual exchange, represented by websites like Gumtree and Freecycle.

There's no need to fantasize that parts of Scotland are conducting an internal exodus to this kind of lifestyle - in pockets, it's already happening (well charted by Lesley Riddoch's reports and columns). But stand for a moment in the rush-hour of Glasgow, Edinburgh or any other busy conurbation in Scotland, as crisply-dressed and clearly-stressed men and women hurtle from office to shops to home, navigating their lives by smart-phone. Facing this melee, the arrival of a slower, more experiential, more self-determining and sustainable Scottish lifestyle is coming at a very slow creep indeed.

What bridge can be built between Green Scot and Consumerist Scot, given that government lecturing, and alternative lifestyles, can easily bounce off our plastic-coated lives of credit cards, designer brands and free upgrades? I think one answer might lie in getting away from the miserable reading of humanity that comes from the "nudge" thinkers and behavioural economists, and looking to other areas of our evolved nature that produce optimism, ingenuity and enthusiasm - namely, our playful selves.

Play is both natural and radical for humans. It's both our connection to the wider world of complex mammals, who also use play as experimentation to help them survive and thrive. But play is also that lifelong flexibility (what the biologists call "neoteny") which allows us to innovate - to "take reality lightly" and shape it according to our plans and dreams.

Can we disconnect our playful capacities - our natural imagination, experimentalism and lust for novelty - from the exploitations of hyper-consumerism? And then reconnect it to a whole range of engagements and activities that provide equal levels of psychic richness and satisfaction to that of status goods or fashionable consumption?

I don't think green lifestyle radicalism can do this on its own. And I do think there is an opportunity for businesses and policy-makers to innovate around answering those playful needs in a much more sustainable manner (from information platforms to festivals, fashion to food consumption). We may need less of an onslaught of trinkets, but we will need more of what the sixties radical Ivan Illich once called "tools for conviviality".

Prosperity for Scotland may well lie in the production of cleaner energy. But if it isn't matched by a shift towards a less consumerist, and more joyfully participative lifestyle, it'll only be half a revolution. 

Pat Kane's forthcoming book is Radical Animal: innovation, sustainability and human nature (www.radicalanimal.net).

Map of Thoughtland: Newsnet Scotland

Newsnet Scotland was launched on March 2010 to address a perceived imbalance in the reporting of Scottish News and current affairs.  We believe that a nation without a balanced media is the poorer for it. Staffed by volunteers Newsnet is the fastest growing news outlet in Scotland, each month we enjoy double digit readership growth.

via www.newsnetscotland.com

I was chatting with Mick Fealty of Northern-Irish-Huff-Post-esque Slugger O'Toole today about the crisis of newspapers - and how they might learn from the way that passionate user communities stream a flow of free editorial into their networks. Newsnet Scotland is a paradigm example of the phenomenon. It was set up by some Scottish independence supporting activists and coders, and is explicitly aimed at redressing what they percieve to be (and arguably is) a media imbalance in the reporting of independence politics in the MSM (Mainstream Scottish Media), ie a bias towards "Unionist" (pro-UK) perspectives. Amid some kitschy cultural moments, Newsnet Scotland does a great service in giving its activist constituency a mix of curated pieces from independence-learning mainstream writers, and "commissioned" pieces from a range of activist voices (Thoughtland has already been sought out). Revenue? Trying to surmount the usual online ad hump. But vibrant and authentic to the mood of the Scottish Spring. 

Map of Thoughtland: AFTERnow

Western civilisation has conquered great health perils in the past. But the peculiarly modern malaise seems resistant to treatment. Obesity, depression, addiction, loss of wellbeing – these are issues which sap the resources and spirit of modern practitioners. The AfterNow Project seeks to trace the development of our current situation. In six 5-minute introductory videos – backed up by a dozen 10-minute audio podcasts and over 30 short papers – we unpack the ideas which shape and limit contemporary responses... and look to a brave new future for public health.

via www.afternow.co.uk

Very impressive site from Glasgow University's Public Health and Health Policy Section, the brain child of its head Phil Hanlon (with input from the IFF's Andrew Lyon). AFTERnow does a multimedia assault on the agenda of wellbeing (and its corollary, "ill-being") in public life. (Interesting linkage note: I was alerted to its existence from this tweet, which was essentially telling me not to go listening to wild-eyed Italian autonomists for my anti-consumerist critique, when it was right on my doorstep. This is how exactly how a Thoughtland should operate, citizens...)

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. 

* * * 

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.

* * *

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. 

Corralling the Scotterati for freedom (like glitterati, only grumpier): my piece for Guardian G2 special on Scottish independence

Can we have a bit of laugh down in the churning engine-rooms that forge the indepedent Scottish nation of the future? But of course we can! An arch-though-empirical piece for the Guardian's G2 special on Scottish independence, focussing on the celebrity/grandee politics of the last Scottish election (and the next Scottish referendum). I'm pantomiming for the Londoners occasionally, so apologies for that in advance. Original here, and here's the Guardian's cut.

 

* * *

Given a clear choice, you might prefer to see as many degrees of separation as possible between Angelina Jolie and Alex Salmond. But as they say up here, nae luck.

One of the most notable celebrity endorsements (out of many) for the Scottish National Party in this last victorious election was Mark Millar, Scottish comix supremo and originator of her superhero movie vehicle Wanted. So steel yourself for a thumbs-up, three-headed picture from a tartan-fringed red carpet sometime soon, featuring the expansive politician the Tweeters call Maximum Eck.

Alongside the postcode-by-postcode battle for votes in Scotland's general election on May 5, there was an equally vigorous campaign - speed-dial by speed-dial - to secure the Scotterati (they're like the glitterati, only grumpier). And just like the democratic vote, the SNP managed a veritable celebrity landslide.

One by one, the stars crashed down on the side of independence - or at least, of Alex Salmond. The Proclaimers and Sean Connery as usual, of course, but joined this time by the equally Munro-like cragginess of Brian Cox, who (like Mark Miller) told a plausible conversion tale about his shift from old Labour loyalties to new Nationalist futurism. One real coup was Midge Ure, famously indifferent about Vienna but Geldof's under-heralded partner in Live Aid, who expressed his support for Salmond: "Anyone who can give Jeremy Paxman a good run for his money is OK in my books".

Alan Cumming (see graphic above) did possibly the flounciest political endorsement ever on the SNP's YouTube channel, at the very least securing the Edinburgh Festival Fringe vote. (Incidentally, every clip was introduced by a sting which suggested a vote for the Nationalists was like riding on the back of Fireball XL5. There are many irrepressible young uber-geeks at Party HQ). Jack Vettriano, the super-successful but faintly seedy painter of 50's types in suspenders, also climbed on board.

And as for Scottish literateurs, with those at the mountaintop (novelist Alasdair Gray or national poets Edwin Morgan and Liz Lochhead) all long-term, left-wing independence supporters, it's difficult to look down the slopes of the field and see too many who would dissent from that position (crime novelist Ian Rankin plumped for the Scottish Greens, but they want a free Scotland anyway). 

For Scottish Labour, Man Utd manager Alex Ferguson was again dragged out to beat the drum for the People's Party - but was effectively countered by ex-Rangers supremo David Murray proclaiming his support for the First Minister, along with hundreds of other notables in the business and entrepreneurial community.

Many analysts identify Labour's credibility collapse in this election to be the moment when their leader, the eponymous Iain Gray, fled from street protestors and hid in a Subway sandwich shop. But just as semiotically gormless were the images of Gray flanked by Eddie Izzard and Ed Miliband, all of them babbling on about the "Tory threat" to Scotland (when you could fit all the Tories MSPs in Scotland into a small Greggs bread van, with treacle scones to spare). Nice London boys, to be sure, but hardly resonant in Sauchiehall Street.

Why did corralling large herds of the Scotterati matter for the SNP? Cultural hegemony, as old Gramscians in the rival party might mutter. For Salmond's fiendishly-together strategists, it wasn't so much about detoxifying the Nationalist brand, as turning it into what the Saatchis call a "lovemark" - a vote for them becoming an expression of confidence in, and optimism about, Scotland's prospects. Capturing a broad swathe of the McFirmament was crucial to this legitimising project - and if they could have gotten more, they would have.

Interesting, then, to note those who were either chucking stones at the Nationalist bus, or staying silent behind their mirror-shaded publicists. Writer Andrew O'Hagan called the SNP a "parcel of rogues" on their first victory in 2007, though kept his counsel this time round. Billy Connolly too has chucked abuse at the Scottish Parliament as raising "anti-English" sentiment in the past - again, he was invisible at this election.

Ewan McGregor is on record as actively embracing his British identity, Gerard Butler as actively embracing everything else with a pulse, and LA Scot Craig Ferguson (currently contending with David Letterman as the king of late-night) plays up his Caledonian roots for absurdist laughs. 

Edinburgh-based JK Rowling is a known friend of Sarah and Gordon Brown, and made a £1 million donation to the UK Labour party in 2008, but again kept her head down in 2011. Annie Lennox is doing such sterling work saving the entire world from HIV/Aids, dictatorships and war, you'd hardly want her to be bothered with anybody's cheap nylon rosette.

And as for the hipper Scottish musicians like Glasvegas, Franz Ferdinand, Paulo Nutini... well, a cloud of intoxicants and industrial-strength narcissism-stroke-irony are not the strongest drivers of political commitment, one way or another. As they once didn't quite say about Mick Jagger: who would break a midgie on the wheel?

Now that the SNP has its majority, and its aspirations towards independence, they'll be working "as if in the early days of a better nation" (to polish up the Alasdair Gray quote once more). It's all committee work and tough, sandwich-filled meetings with Whitehall civil servants now, and not about pointing your steadicam at gushing, late-comer luvvies.

And of course, nat-lib enthusiasm can be catching. When Alicia Keys played Glasgow in May 2010, invoking her Scottish mum, she urged the audience to "never stop fighting for your freedom, Scotland!"

But also remember that glamour is an old Scots word, meaning "magic, enchantment, spell". The politics of hope and aspiration that the Nationalist victory has unleashed still needs its exemplars and articulators, from happy actor bunnies to morose and brooding Booker prize contenders. Expect to see a new recruitment drive when the date settles for the independence referendum, towards the end of the current Holyrood parliament.

Alicia, Angelina, Jay-Z, Mark Miller and god knows who else on the steps of the UN in New York on 2015, as Maximum Eck secures his seat at the ultimate top-table event? As the man might say himself: bliss it is in this very dawn to be eating pies. All of them.

Loving: Tim Flannery's Here On Earth (visionary), Kurt Elling's perfect version of Norwegian Wood (bastard), Bookforum.com's ideas-blog Omnivore, iPlayer (an inexhaustible stash for this political junkie), Blytheswood Hotel (perfect hang-out for Glasvegans. Different from other vegans).  

 

Why Jim Sillars is dead wrong about "independence-lite"

This is the original version of my essay in The Scotsman, "Optimist puts the case for Scotland", which took the SNP colossus Jim Sillars to task for his concept of "independence-lite". All comments welcome.

By Pat Kane

It's fair to say - along with the not-so-gentle student arm-twisting of a newly elected representative for the South of Scotland region - that the veteran SNP grandee Jim Sillars is responsible for my current political identity.

His concept of independence-in-Europe, articulated in his mid 80's book Scotland: A Case For Optimism - and still on the SNP website - was the first time I'd heard a truly sophisticated argument for Scottish independence: about reconnecting to the wider world, not just chippily tilting against our largest near-neighbour.

Somewhere in my personal archives I have a piece of campaign literature from the 1992 SNP campaign, arguing for "The New Union" for Scotland - that is, the European Union, with Scotland as integrated but independent nation-state within it. I also remember seeing Jim at a conference about 10 years ago, arguing with great vision about how an independent Scotland could contribute to the creation of a "strong European feel", which would help legitimate and bolster a European governance that was certainly facing its challenges at that time.

This is personal, too: back to 1992, I shared an SNP Snappy Bus on Jim's last, desparate day as a Govan MP during that years General Election. My admiration for his commitment to, and sympathy for, ordinary voters hasn't diminished from that day to this. 

But I have to say, quite clearly, that Jim's current advocacy of what he's calling "independence-lite" is fundamentally wrong - by which I mean the wrong political strategy for a majority SNP government, and an independence movement, readying itself for a momentous referendum.

In his Scotsman article, Jim clearly outlines what he thinks this revised vision of Scottish independence is:

an independent country in international law which has a kind of confederal relationship with England, in which the latter continues to carry out cross-Border functions like the DVLA, perhaps pension and social security payments, and a BBC with beefed up Scottish representation at Trust level. One which engages us in a quasi-Nato relationship on shared defence and security against terrorism, with Scotland paying its share of costs of those functions, plus our share of UK debt, from its sovereignty over all taxation including oil, and perhaps offsetting some of those costs by leasing the Trident base for a long period 

What is noticeable, instantly, is the absence of the European Union from this picture. Does this mean that independence-supporters are giving up on playing their part in the policy-forming councils of Europe? Particularly when the general thrust of European policy - on social welfare, on environmental regulation, on urban development, on education - is still much more in line with the Scottish consensus than anything coming from Westminster? This seems a bizarre "Little Britain" horizon to impose on a politics of Scottish independence. 

The next trouble-zone is Sillars' check-list of "cross-Border functions". This is one area which requires detailed and vigorous debate among independence supporters, and certainly not some imposed fiat from the high command of the SNP. I guess I'm revealing myself as a "fundi" - and maybe a Green fundi - in this debate, as I find myself unwilling to think that there are any of these functions that wouldn't benefit from a maximum degree of Scottish control. 

Relinquishing sovereignty over "pension and social security payment" systems bespeaks a puzzling failure of nerve. Jim is keen to point out how polling support for independence is in the low 30's. I would also like to point out that 50% of the possible Scottish electorate did not even bother to vote in this great democratic moment. Surely we should realise that such citizen apathy is partly explained by the socio-economic deprivations, and psychological exhaustion, of large areas of "forgotten Scotland" (about to burst onto our screens again with BBC Scotland's The Scheme)?

We must have the powers to integrate the boom-time of the "green industrialisation of Scotland" with the need to rebuild the essentials of community life in large areas of this country. Some of that will happen under a cascade of apprenticeships for lads and lassies o' pairts - but new employment isn't the only measure that will heal the scars and distortions of generations of neglect.

We should give ourselves the latitude to think creatively about what social support means in a sustainable Scotland - for example, looking at some of the agenda for shorter working weeks and co-production of services that think-tanks like the New Economics Foundation are suggesting. Again, why should we relinquish policy autonomy over that area, when the current reality is so underdeveloped and ineffective?

Maintaining the BBC with "a beefed-up Scottish presence at Trust level"? This is a real collapse of will-power. In a multi-channel, multi-device, expanding-bandwidth media world, it is not beyond the wit of an independent Scottish media public regulators and institutions to cut licensing and permission deals with the BBC as a content provider, such that the televisual component of the "social union" is easily accessible to anyone in Scotland.

But we should, firstly, be able to spend what we actually raise in Scottish public broadcasting, and secondly, take the chance to amplify the Scottish voice within and outwith the country. This would be an opportunity for creative and administrative innovation which, I would expect, Scottish mediators should jump at. 

Maximal sovereign control of national public media and its regulation also has an impact on Scotland economically and geopolitically. How can our media better support the quality of expert and strategic conversation about possible Scottish futures in this country? In an age of spectrum plenitude, is it beyond us to think of public channels that properly serve our imperatives in say, education, business development, arts and culture? (I argued for this in my submission to the Scottish Broadcasting Commission).

And even in terms of big-ticket investments in quality television and film, are we really able to make clear-headed decisions about this, when the ultimate gravity of decision-making still rests in Wood Lane?

On what would seem like a minor matter of the DVLA: of course we can organise European-continent-style, cross-border ease of mobility and registration - we have the systems to make that easy and possible. But in a low-carbon era when the regulation of personal transport will become a big issue - and where incentives to cleaner kinds of vehicles might need to be applied - again, do we leave this entirely to Westminster which is, cross-party, environmentally static, if not regressive? Why should we surrender our governmental imagination here? 

Finally, on Jim's suggestions of pooled defence and security arrangements, Nato-friendliness, and acceptance of Trident, we come to a position which will easily split the community of independence supporters and activists right down the middle. Of course, Scotland's military posture always been the elephant in the room of independence. Listening to leading SNP politicians "defend Scotland" and its rights to UK military investment in hi-tech engineering, or local military bases, has always been a thoroughly unedifying and incoherent spectacle.

But surely in a post-Iraq-and-Afghanistan, post-Black-Watch Scotland, we should be maintaining our ambivalence about Scottish armed forces being readily dragged into the adventurism (and energy opportunism) of larger nations at the fag-end of Empire. This means a proper separation from Nato, at best United Nations involvement, and appropriate (but well-monitored) collaborations on terrorism and security. Not to mention the sheer waste of intellect and expertise of significant sectors of Scottish engineering being consumed with aircraft-less aircraft carriers, at a time when we should be shoving our productive clusters full-speed towards renewable energy development.

For many of us who came into independence politics from the left, the idea of nursemaiding Trident for two decades - soothing the ex-superpower traumas of post-imperial Britain, in return for confederal autonomy - is the point at which we exit. And that Jim can even countenance a 20-year period in which Trident is slowly managed into obsolescence, while still being the useless and exorbitant phallus of UK geopolitical potency, makes me wonder whether this is the same man I knew 25 years ago.

Finally, the question of keeping a bruised UK Westminster government "onside" in negotiations for independence, soothing the trauma of losing their big-power status by allowing them to retain Trident and other visible structures of Union, is to me wrongly posed.

Cock an ear to current debates within the centre-left in England, particularly around the Compass group in the Labour Party, and their presumption is that a Scotland heading for independence will be a catalyst for all kinds of progressive coalitions in an English polity. It could drive sections of the Lib Dems and Labour closer together, keeping the door open for a much more proportional electoral system (attracting disillusioned Lib Dems). These debates are also addressing what a truly refounded English national identity would be, shorn of the delirium tremens of the post-Imperial hangover - taken away from defensiveness or big-power angst.

Our movement towards independence is actually assisting the rise of a post-British England, which growing numbers of Southern progressives want the chance to explore

Scottish independence may indeed threaten "English state interests". But the view from their end of the telescope may be less obdurately statist, or at least more fluid and in process, than Jim believes. They think we're militant and strident about self-determination: why give any other impression? 

On share of national debt and revenue from hydrocarbons, I'm reasonably confident that our resident phalanx of patriotic Scottish energy economists and Scottish laywers, armed with global references and precedents, will get a good (if not ideal) result. Jim tries to imply a devil's trade between a reasonable deal on the resource foundations of an independent Scotland, and the retention of large and toxic features of the governance of the British State. I think he's wrong, and very strangely for him, something of a feartie here.

At exactly this moment - when a demonstrable Nationalist competence in government, and vision of the future, has gathered significant support in Scottish life - it seems weird to suddenly reduce our ambitions, and give up on campaigning for the necessary prize of nation-state independence. Even on the level of Brand Scotland (never mind "Team Scotland"), we'll get one shot to unambiguously and significantly re-appear on the world stage of globalisation. Should we do it in a half-assed way? Are we any less of a national polity than any of the post-Communist nations, who negotiated their independence from a much larger and more pernicious power than tottering, querulous 21st century Britain?

Federalism or confederalism are coherent, legitimate Unionist options, which should be compressed into a second option in a referendum, and put to the Scottish people. But to blur the clarity of independence's powers over crucial, and even morally urgent, dimensions of Scottish self-determination, is to me profoundly mistaken. Never mind the last gasp of the Union - is this the last gasp of Scottish inferiorism? And, as I've said throughout this piece, much more in sorrow than anger, from the most unexpected of sources?

As the constitutional expert Robert Hazell said at the weekend, "Defence, macroeconomic policy and foreign affairs are key features of statehood. Does the SNP want Scotland to be independent or not?" Over to you, Jim.

"Scotland becomes a politically & economically modern state through culturally & socially post-modern means"

An excerpt from something I wrote in 1993, in a very McBennite mode, for the Scottish culture-and-politics magazine Variant (here's the PDF of the magazine):

I am beginning to think that we become politically and economically modern - an effective nation-state - through culturally and social post-modern means. That is, through figures, spokespersons, groupings and movements, arguing for a Scottish polity, society and culture that is futuristic; that links our deepest moral urges - for security, connection, novelty, freedom - to our most most practical societal arrangements.

Edward Said, in the second of his Reith Lectures on the role of the intellectual, gives the radical potential of Scottish national liberation a perfect rationale: quoting Frantz Fanon, Said says that the point is not to replace oppressive administrators with benign administrators: the point is "the invention of new souls". And for intellectuals, artists and other political actors, the point is to "universalise" the national crisis - to "give greater human scope to what a particular nation has suffered, to associate that experience with the suffering of others". National liberation, as a means to human liberation. 

So self-determination can mean determination of one's self: nations and persons can both express autonomy-in-solidarity with their fellow citizens and the world community. Scotland can be free, if free-thinking; Scotland can be recreated, if its citizens are truly, profoundly, illimitably creative. 

Yes, I've been around this block a few times before...

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.

* * *

“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. 

* * *

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: The SNP and the Greens should start to build bridges, not burn them

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - as the Holyrood election day gets closer, I got a new take on things from a business visit to Catalonia. How do we build an effective bridge between the SNP and the Scottish Greens, such that both drive Scotland towards sustainable flourishing? Might a new focus on urban development help? All comments welcome.

* * *

Coming back from a few days doing media business in Barcelona to election-fever Glasgow sets up some interesting resonances in the mind. In some ways, the Catalan capital feels like Scotland about, say, five years ahead.

My conference was a cutting-edge, London-originated event about social media and journalism, with a cast list including everyone from WikiLeakers to Al Jazeera, the Guardian to Amnesty, held in a futuristic media-arts building.

Yep, as cosmopolitan as it gets – a feeling reinforced as the credit-card-ready taxis barrel you through Barça’s amazing 19th century urban grid, which in any case looks like a mash-up of the best bits of Glasgow and Edinburgh’s tenements and monuments.

But this wasn’t just a stylish, switched-on Anywhere, but a particular Somewhere. In order for the conference to function at all, we had to wear our trilingual headsets (Catalan, Castilian and English) to understand each other. The local newspeople attending were as feisty and crusty as any of the senior hacks might be from our own Scottish national newspapers. And on the way there, I’d been listening to a podcast by the illustrious former mayor of Barcelona Joan Clos, whose vision of the city’s sustainable development has led him to a senior UN position on the future of world cities.

Of course, like Scotland (but for a lot longer), Catalonia has had a constitutional argument running that wants more national powers – macro-level tools to help realise the historic modernisme and progressive culture that has marked Catalan identity for the last century. As I returned into the mild blitz of the SNP’s manifesto launch – with its flurry of actors, writers, movie-makers and general imagineers in support, and a prospectus which (whether you believe all its details or not) is undoubtedly a serious and comprehensive programme for government – the Catalonian parallels seemed obvious.

Well, let’s see. Certainly a re-election of the SNP government would signify that left-of-centre civic nationalism has become the natural political expression of mainstream Scotland. Perhaps what’s being instituted here is that decades-long hegemony of progressive nationalist government that so characterises Catalonian politics.

But it’s fascinating to note where things are in Catalonia. A recent movement of local, city and town elections – organised from the grassroots and without constitutional “legitimacy” – has culminated in a Barcelona city vote where nine out of ten participants supported independence. Are bottom-up and community passions for independence equally as vibrant in Scotland, even if Salmond’s political charisma is given another “kick of the ball”?

In Catalonia, the decision of the Spanish constitutional court to actually pull back some powers from their parliament led to clear majorities in independence polls (with Barcelona FC’s head rallying to the cause; surely that’s a better use of a big-city football director’s energies than… well, you know).

Will some similarly ham-fisted move by the UK coalition government trigger a similar town-by-town referendum culture here? If the Salmondistas have ambitions beyond seeming like the natural managers of a devolved or federal Scotland, an “independence movement” is something they should be thinking about fomenting and supporting, when/if they return to their ministerial desks.

Yet this again indicates a deficit in the strategic and policy culture around the SNP which many commentators (such as Gerry Hassan and, more acerbically, Tom Gallagher) have pointed out. One pays due respect to the Scottish Independence Convention, pulled together by the ex-Herald columnist Murray Ritchie. The SIC has doughtily tried to create a space in which those who support a nation-state for Scotland, from a range of ideological positions, can find a way to discuss tactics towards that end (their election blog is a fine example of this).

But some of us would like to see a platform or process that allows a fully mature independence policy debate to take place – one in which the full powers of a small European nation-state are presumed, but where we can have vigorous discussions about the challenges that sovereignty faces.

For me, as I’ve written here and elsewhere, the most vital relationship would be between the SNP and the Greens. (I’d love to think that there were a few non-tribal social democrats in the Labour party who could join in, but that might be asking too much.) In the same way as the socialist parties (pre-Tommy Sheridan’s meltdown) were able to nudge previous Holyrood administrations towards social justice, I’d like to see a strong Green contingent keep an SNP-led administration focused on the low-carbon agenda.

But I think there needs to be some moderation and wisdom on both sides, if such a relationship was to be fruitful and effective. On the SNP side, they should realise that the mix of social justice, localism and a genuinely planetary perspective on our daily lives represented by Green politics could be one of the strong elements of an “independence movement”. We need a real push towards empowered communities – where people are supported to “co-create” their services, living conditions and energy. This autonomy will generate a natural ambition for wider social – in the Scottish context, constitutional – change.

Sure, football heads, transport tycoons and engineering buccaneers can get on Salmond’s sustainable bus (deliberate pun) towards a planet-friendly economy – but the “reindustrialisation” of Scotland must not be misinterpreted as the “back-to-consumerism” of Scotland. We have to begin, however gently and convivially, a discussion about a change in the Scottish lifestyle that plays its part in a low-carbon society. A firm foot in the European and global discussions about green futures should arise from a good relationship with a Green cohort in Holyrood.

But on the Green party side, I think there has to be some give-and-take too – and coming back from the hustle and brio of Barcelona makes it clear what that should be. Much of the Green’s policy agenda on energy generation and conservation, on examining how we are taxed locally and environmentally, on support for small enterprise and free education, are only slightly to the left of the SNP.

But there’s also a puzzling modesty about their support for independence – where a stronger and clearer commitment would increase their credibility on how macro-policy could serve their ideals, surely largely frustrated under a devolution settlement.

Also, strangely for such an idealistic party, there is too much fist-waving and opposition, and very little joy and aspiration – no real flavour of the different “quality of life” that a transition to an ecologically oriented society might bring (their arts, culture and sports policy, for example, is gestural at best).

My favourite Green gurus (such as Tim Jackson, Juliet Schor and Kate Soper) try to use positive terms like “plenitude” and “prosperity”, “hedonism” and “flourishing”, to invoke the richness of the change towards post-consumerist living.

Very little of that uplifting language here – and not enough of the recent recognition among environmental thinkers that city and urban life, in all its mess, scale and diverse excitement, is actually one clear path to low-carbon living. Greens might need to accept that the price to pay for the SNP’s no-nukes and pro-renewables policies, its high-level commitment to green economics, and its willingness to push for collective lifestyle changes, is one more bridge over the Forth.

But it’s a “bridge” in a wider, deeper sense. It expresses a historic commitment to personal mobility, and “shovel-ready” infrastructure jobs, that plays well to a Scottish electorate. We’re clearly enjoying our narratives of “positive” change for the country. The problem with much Scottish Green rhetoric (particularly evident in Patrick Harvie’s often censorious and lecturing performances in public debates) is that it places them outside the feel-good festival.

Of course, the dice might fall completely differently in the next two weeks or so, and all this will be moot. But sometimes you have to columnise as if you were living in the early days of a better nation...

The politics of happiness, Scottish-style: interview for Scotland on Sunday

My old colleague Anna Burnside called me up the other week looking for quotes on an article about happiness - and its national measurement in the forthcoming National Household Survey - for Scotland on Sunday. Was delighted to oblige, and I think they're work reprinting here in full. (And of course, any excuse to reprint Raeburn's portrait of the skater - Scottish exuberance at its most elegant). 

Do you think attempting to take the nation's happiness into account when constructing legislation is a good idea?

It depends how standardised your idea of "happiness" is. For example, lots of research in this area observes that strong marriages are better for people's spirits, health and prospects - and that separation reduces those indicators. So it's tempting for legislators to then say, "make divorce more difficult" - as the happiness guru Lord Layard does. Many liberals will rightly have a problem with that.

I really suspect the motives of Big Society Tories for introducing this measure - it's easy for a bunch of plutocrats to rhapsodise about how much people lives aren't really defined by material wealth as much as "perception of wellbeing". The fact that they do so while inflicting an unnecessarily brutal round of public sector cuts shows how delusional (or heedlessly arrogant) they are in thinking they could ever be on top of a "happiness" agenda.

Policy makers started to look at happiness in boom times, when they noticed that reported levels of contentment were flatlining as GDP and living standards were rising. Add to the recession the challenges of a low-carbon economy, and in the future we're probably looking at a contracting, or at best a steady-state economy overall. But beware who exactly is peddling a "happiness over wealth" agenda in this context. Intelligent, constructive eco-types like the Green party or the New Economics Foundation - or even the left-of-centre consensus in the Scottish parliament - yes. Ideologically-extremist small-staten Con-Dems... Apply the requisite bargepole.

What kind of practical measures could legislators take to increase our general happiness?

Well... One of the fantasies of the Coalition is that they think there will be a huge rush towards joyous, altruistic social volunteering - clearly a key component of happiness - under conditions where those out of work are increasing in numbers, & those in work are putting excessive hours. As Oscar Wilde might have said, the problem with the Big Society is that it takes too many evenings. One thing governments could do with their powers - after all, they can nationalise globe straddling banks easily enough - is to push down the length of the average working week to 30 hours (NEF say 21 hrs eventually), without a directly proportional reduction in pay.

Yes, one way we can generate contentment in our lives, in a non-material way, is to be pro-social and community minded people. But I think it is verging on cruel surrealism for governments to promote that without pushing back the boundaries of working time in our lives. Then politicians have to trust that we'll use that free time and space wisely and well - because to me, it's the ability to freely extend your capacities as you choose that brings happiness, not some national target or prescription.

Do you think that putting happiness at the centre of policy will play differently in Scotland than in England?

I think in Scotland we have an asset that England, unfortunately, lacks - which is a positive, progressive, optimistic, even futuristic version of national identity. This is something that we've been explicitly concerned with for 30 years, even since Alastair Gray's great appeal to "work as if you were in the early days of a better nation". We have up here the potential to tap into a collective spirit of wellbeing through sport, culture, heritage, media. I don't get the sense that we're seething with a sense of resentment & lost status in the way that post-empire England is. Much of the appeal of political nationalism in Scotland is about hope and vision.

So actually, I think the steady journey towards independence, with more and more Scots gaining more control over major institutions in their own society, is one of the biggest boosts towards national happiness that you could devise! Its perhaps more about optimism than happiness in Scotland - a desire to play an active part in your own future.

Is there something in our psyche, Calvinism or something else, which makes us suspicious of happiness as a goal?

It's always the charge, isn't it? Someone says, "what a sunny day", and someone else says, "aye, we'll pay for it!" But I've just been reviewing the productions of BBC Scotland's Comedy Unit over the last few days - and you could hardly say that these don't evidence a healthy national propensity for fun and irreverence - admittedly somewhat hairy-arsed in tone at times. I think it's never going to be all Californian happy-clappiness in Scorland - indeed, the better positive psychologists say you need an good dash of minatory pessimism to strengthen your happy outlook. I think, as the old Rikki Fulton show had it, our national mood is "Scotch and wry". Forwards, but with a Connery-esque eyebrow raised high.

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. 

* * *

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.  

Thoughtland on the UK Coalition's green contradictions in their latest Budget

Short comment requested by Newsnet Scotland on today's UK budget: 

The most notable element of the Budget for me was the announcment of a green investment bank, able to invest in new sustainable technologies and businesses where returns are too risky for the open markets. It's been long called for - and it was clearly a prize demanded by the Liberal Democrats as a price of Coalition. But it's a weak entity: access to £3billion funds seems considerable, but compared to the kind of infrastructure revolution that a low-carbon economy and society needs, it's a very small budget indeed (and the bank won't be able to borrow for five years). Couldn't a few of the government's largely nationalised banks - Northern Rock and RBS - be largely directed towards building this infrastructure, at a far greater scale than this institution could manage? 

I also wonder whether the blizzard of measures aimed at supporting start-up business creation, and external investment from foreign business, undercuts their own aim to be the "most green government ever". To what extent does a "bonfire of regulations" imply exempting start-up enterprises from detailed considerations of the energy resources they're putting through their services and products? The world's first price floor for carbon sounds like a step in the right direction, in making us realise the real cost of dirty energy generation - but it's the nuclear industry in the UK who welcome this most http://ind.pn/gETI6e, as it will make their economic case much stronger. And of course, Britain's "hard-pressed families" will benefit from their petrol-duty being cut, but it does the opposite of discouraging carbon-intensive car usage. 

I noted at the end how much Osborne is returning to the enterprise fundamentals of heyday Thatcherism - the "march of the makers", coming through new industrial and academic development zones, that will deliver the perpetually sought-for "growth". But these climate-critical days, growth simply can't be incanted like a magic spell. "Makers" aren't just smart young boys coming up with Google-competitors in Shoreditch or Oxford. These days, below the to-and-fro of despatch boxes, I look to governments who get the whole challenge of moving towards environmentally-sustainable societies (which I think, incidentally, the Scottish government does get) . Perhaps no surprise that the Coalition didn't join up the dots any better than expected.

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?

Map of Thoughtland: Ewan Morrison's Tales From The Mall

Anecdotes, jokes, urban myths, tales of horror, boredom, infatuation or even just shopping – almost everybody has a story to tell about something that happened to them in a shopping mall. For example, you may have heard the one about the man who was accidentally locked inside John Lewis for a night and slept in the bedding section; or the one about how an entire mall had to be closed for a day because of something ‘un-hygenic’ that fell out of somebody’s handbag; or the one about the teenager who caught her mum buying lingerie with her lover in Victoria’s Secret. There are stories of love and hate; of how communities have been transformed for the better or completely destroyed by malls.

 Tales from the Mall started life as a collection of short stories by myself. Since the research material turned out to be so rich, I’ve decided to expand the project, to create a collection of Scottish ‘mall stories’.

via ewanmorrison.com

Ewan is an ambitious, contemporary Scottish novelist, but who began as a filmmaker, and who has roamed promiscuously around the image industries before settling down at his laptop to chart the libidinal landscapes of Scotland/UK. Tales From The Mall is a multimedia act of storytelling around modern consumer experience. Everything Ewan does is informed by a very sharp and well-read critical intellect. Worth tracking. 

Between a Creative Scotland and a Cultural Scotland: Pat Kane chapter for 'Radical Scotland: Arguments for Self-Determination

This week, the indefatigable Gerry Hassan (with Rosie Ilett) brings out a new collection of essays entitled Radical Scotland: Arguments for Self-Determination. It's quite a "map of Thoughtland" (or the contemporary Scottish intelligentsia), including James Mitchell, Michael Keating, David Donald and Alan Hutton, Drew Scott, John McLaren, Phil Hanlon and Freja Ulvestad Karki, Keir Bloomer, Sue Palmer and Alan Sinclair, Fergus McNeil, Jim McCormick and Katie Grant, Douglas Robertson, Eurig Scandrett, Andy Wightman, Neil Mulholland, Joan McAlpine, Anthony Barnett and Will Hutton, Zygmunt Bauman, Richard Wyn-Jones and Tom Nairn... and yours truly. 

The eagle-eyed reader will see a bit of conceptual recycling from parallel writings in my Play Ethic guise - but as the topic was the wider question of the enabling conditions of creativity in contemporary Scotland, I think it was a relevant steal. It's pretty academic in tone in places, for which some apologies.

As ever, all comments and dissemination welcome. 

 

Between a Creative Scotland and a Cultural Scotland

Pat Kane

(Chapter 16 of Radical Scotland)

There is much academic dispute about what the term "creative industries" actually means - and by implication, how that meaning shapes policy-making. Galloway and Dunlop make it clear that there has to be a distinction between "cultural industries" and "creative industries" (Dunlop and Galloway, 2007). For them, culture implies "the production and circulation of symbolic ideas", and has a direct relationship to the right of self-expression, and by association the health of a democracy, as defined by various articles of the UN Declaration of Human Rights (and further refinements by UNESCO).

The question of "cultural industry" is then about the extent to which public policy supports "the space for different types of cultural expression, including local, regional and national cultural identities, which may not play to a global market, and may never make big bucks". A cultural perspective has to consider how communities need "structural possibilities of continuity and reference", and "a shared vocabulary of tradition and convention" (Dworkin, 1985), in order to get the most out of culture. Those structures and vocabularies can be built through public goods like museums, libraries and particular subsidies of artists and scenes, aiming to secure the widest possible access to cultural meaning.

The problem with subsuming "cultural industries" under "creative industries", for Dunlop and Galloway, is that it blurs and fuzzes this linkage between culture, self-expression, democracy, and non-market values. They make the obvious point that "creativity" - the application of new ideas to conventional conditions - exists in almost every "industry", and that the term is so capacious as to be effectively meaningless. 

But they also identify that the term has salience in very political contexts. And particularly the post New-Labour era of promoting the idea of a "knowledge economy" - where all ideas and sensibilities are regarded as inputs into a commercial environment; where the outputs are most evidently in those cultural forms that combine technology and "symbolic ideas" (film, tv, publishing, internet, computer games); and where revenue comes from the accumulative sale of objects/services and the exploitation of intellectual rights.

Dunlop and Galloway have fears about a "creative industries" paradigm - centrally concerned with the commercial rent to be derived from symbolic and semiotic expression - and how it might come to dominate how public bodies think about the support and development of culture. Might it be part of "a longer term strategy to undermine the ideological basis for state cultural support? When the distinctive attributes of culture are being so purposely ignored, we may ask whether we are slowly heading for a US approach to culture, as in healthcare and education?" These writers powerfully alert us to the implications of the use of the term "creative" in any debates about cultural policy. 

So does a "Creative" Scotland anticipate the kind of creeping marketisation of cultural provision that Dunlop and Galloway fear? The consistent formulation used on the department's new website - as the "new national leader for Scotland’s arts, screen and creative industries" - implies (at least syntactically) a distinct understanding of something called an "arts industry", which in its policies might reflect those "distinctive attributes of culture" - around democracy, common resources and rights of self-expression - that the writers adamantly defend. One should also remember the parting statement from the outgoing chairman of the Scottish Arts Council (Creative Scotland's predecessor), Richard Holloway: 

Creative Scotland is going to have to pull off the difficult feat of trying to forward the Government’s agenda for growing the economy by unleashing Scotland’s creativity, without taming the anarchic energy that lies at the heart of the creative act .... Living with this tension without trying to resolve it will give us edge and keep us on our intellectual toes. But Government, too, will have to recognise that we cannot always be a comfortable ally for them as they pursue their different but legitimate purposes. We will be vigilant in protecting the spiritual integrity of Scotland’s makers, including their ancient right to bite the hands that feed them. And we will never forget Graham Greene’s admonition that disloyalty is the primary virtue of the artist. If we can all learn to live within that tension without trying to resolve it, then Scotland will have become a truly creative nation. (Holloway, 2009)

Is this a tension that can be "lived with... without trying to resolve it"? The early indications from the new leadership of Creative Scotland are fascinating. A story in the Scottish Review revealed correspondence between Creative Scotland's head, Andrew Dixon, and a grant application, in which Dixon wrote that "we will not be a funding body in the old sense of the Arts Council but a strategic body". A minor public dispute resultedⁱ, where Dixon answered the Scottish Review’s charge that the secret agenda of the new Creative Scotland is “the privatisation of the arts”. Dixon said:

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. (Roy, 2010) 

From a commercial arts and media perspective, 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 - Dunlop and Galloway's vision of arts practice as a public good connected to democratic self-expression. Those of us who have dealt with managers, investors and svengalis of the music business, have heard for years 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.

What might be haunting the new Creative Scotland is the J.K. Rowling scenario. A few thousand pounds from the Scottish Arts Council is granted to a struggling writer to help her complete her children’s novel. The book becomes one 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.

But there are many subtle dimensions to the relationship between markets, property, subsidy and the autonomy of the artist. Until recently, I’ve never taken a penny from public arts subsidy and then was given a few thousands pounds to be a judge, in 2009 and 2010, for the Scottish Books of the Year. This 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 in 2010, 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. 

But there is no inevitable happy spot to be found between artistic autonomy and more commercially aware public arts bodies - and there shouldn’t be. 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. 

Do we go to see contemporary art, for example, hoping that it’s going to be “customer-sensitive” – or do we want it to be customer-insensitive, to rattle and shock us into the new. The right of pure artists to maintain a creative distance from their funders (or as Holloway would put it, a "creative disobedience") must be maintained. In the overall balance of arts, even commercial artists want 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, they must still recognise their ultimate function: as the organisation that allows imaginations to lift free from the usual pressure of consumer or investor expectations.

Culture as a "public good" is about providing intense visions in our lives, available generally and at no or low cost. And that’s about an ‘intellectual commons’, not intellectual property – not just a competitive market, but an ecology of creativity. But talk of an "intellectual commons" or an "ecology of creativity" should prompt us again to look at what we mean by creativity, beyond Galloway and Dunlop's account of it as a terminological stalking-horse for commercialisation of the arts. Could there be a understanding of Scottish "creativity" that evades both its assumed conjunction with the "industrial", and the implication that commercial relations and property rights are necessarily involved?

In an aside, Galloway and Dunlop note that "individual creativity could equally well include developing scientific innovations, yet industries that develop these are not typically included in definitions of the creative sector". They seem to have overlooked one of the most notable institutional innovations of the New Labour era - the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). Though its current incarnation is the promotion of innovation in the public sector, its original ambit in 1997 was to encourage collaboration between the arts and sciences, in cross-disciplinary endeavours and projects.

Yet with the increasing spread of information and communication technologies (ICT) into every area of social existence in the developed West, it would be easy to say that such a collaboration between arts and sciences has been going on entirely by itself, without much need for public policy of any kind at all. And where do the productions of the internet sit in a debate that counterposes "cultural industry" to "creative industry"? Where do phenomena like Google, YouTube, Facebook and Flickr sit between the poles of symbolic communication as an expression of freedom and human rights (at one end), and functional systems, instrumental technology and marketed products (at the other)? Surely the latter facilitates and enriches the former, equally as much as it subjects it to the law of the market? 

Cyberculture - an old term, but still useful - has a complex relationship to debates around culture, creativity and the relationship between public and private. We are living through an era, comparable to that of the introduction of movable type in the 14th century, where the transformation in the production of cultural representations and expressions is causing a shift in several regimes of power - political, organisational, economic, even familial and emotional. Beyond debates about public or private subsidy of the arts, or policies aimed at exploiting new ideas, the operations of the Net reveal some fundamental strata of the human condition - among them a "creativity", or openness to change and transformation, which is far more elementally subversive than any particular cultural or business initiative.

The distinct neoteny of our species – that is, the extension of youthful characteristics far into our maturity, by comparison even with other simians – keeps us always, as the Italian thinker Paulo Virno says, in a state of "permanent formation" (Virno, 2009). We have kept this endemic and anxiety-inducing openness to the world under control, says Virno, by means of what he calls "cultural and social devices" – religions, castes, class identities, civic values, educational systems, regional and national cultural traditions. But Virno's warning is that the regime of flexible production and informationalised management that typifies contemporary Western capitalism is now uniquely exploiting our neoteny. Post-Fordism (should we bite the bullet and call it Googlism?) deliberately accelerates this indeterminacy – the faculties that open us up to endemic flexiblity and openess – to make it the very fuel of the social and economic order: "The death of specialised instincts and the lack of a definite environment, which have been the same from the Cro-Magnons onwards, today appear as noteworthy economic resources". Virno moves through our natural faculties of potentiality, and lashes them methodically to the flexible personality required by informational capitalism.

Our biological non-specialisation? The grounding for the "universal flexibility" of labour services: "The only professional talent that really counts in post-Fordist production is the habit not to acquire lasting habits, that is the capacity to react promptly to the unusual". Our neotenic forever-youngness, always ready to learn and adapt? We are now subject to "permanent formation… what matters is not what is progressively learning (roles, techniques, etc) but the display of the pure power to learn". That fact that we are not determined by our environment, but make and construct our worlds? This is mirrored by the "permanent precarity of jobs", where we wander nomadically from one cloud in the nebulous world of labour markets to another.

With a sardonic gloominess worthy of Theodor Adorno, Virno denies that this intrinsically unstable system necessarily leads to unruliness – "far from it". In traditional societies with less pervasive markets (which one presumes includes Fordism), our deep ontological anxiety could be contained by "protective cultural niches". The "omnilateral potentiality" of flexible capitalism shakes those niches to fragments. Yet even though this disembeddedness allows for an "unlimited variability of rules", when those rules are applied, they are much more "tremendously rigid" than the Fordist workplace. Each productive instance is like the tight rules of a competitive game, easily entered into but severely binding when the play begins.

When commanded by our managements to respond to today's adhoc list of tasks and projects, in a world of frazzling openness and potentiality, we display "a compulsive reliance on stereotyped formulae". It is via these formulae that we "contain and dilute" the pervasive indeterminacy of the human condition. Virno characterises them as:

reaction-halting behaviours, obsessive tics, the drastic impoverishments of the ars combinatoria, the inflation of transient but harsh norms…Though on the one hand, permanent formation and the precarity of employments guarantee the full exposure to the world, on the other they instigate the latter's reduction to a spectral or mawkish dollhouse. Virno, 2009)

To return to our theme: if being "creatively Scottish", according to our public bodies and their optimistic political managers, is about maintaining our potentiating flexibility, about fuelling the plural energies of the playful self, this may not be – according to Virno – as progressive as it thinks it might be. To describe some products of our cultural industries as a "spectral or mawkish dollhouse" - in a UK regularly gripped by reality and talent shows that repeat some of the most enduring passivities of commercial culture - doesn't seem too far from the mark. And what might it profit a generation of media studies, liberal arts or cultural studies graduates to gain a full facility in the "ars combinatoria", yet deploy them in the "drastic impoverishments" of the reality tv show or the taste-marketing analytics consultancy?

Virno claims that the playfulness which has always been a touchstone for artistic practice from Romanticism onwards has now become the Achilles Heel of productive subjectivity - the point of susceptible engagement with processes of miasmic exploitation (or at least expropriation) of human creativity. How do we question the baroque mechanisms of psychological capture that Virno so mordantly describes, all their fine-grained capitalisation of our playful natures? Is there any escape from a vision of our post-Fordist cultural existence as "bigger cages, longer chains"?

Certainly, Virno's is not the only social-scientific reading of our wide-open, neotenic natures which is available. The education psychologist Brian Sutton-Smith identifies one evolutionary function of play as the continuation of "neonatal optimism" throughout the life-span (Sutton-Smith, 2009). The "unrealistic optimism, egocentricity and reactivity" of the growing child, all of them "guarantors of persistence in the face of adversity", characterise many of our adult play behaviours. Play brings a sense of joyful indefatigability and energetic resilience, which – like the pleasure of sex for procreation – is evolution's "salute" to the human animal for maintaining a "general liveliness", in the face of the challenges of existence.

Sutton-Smith sees play forms as an expression of reflective 'secondary' emotion, as ways to deal constructively with the 'primary' emotions located in the more reactive parts of the human brain. The amygdala that generates shock, anger, fear, disgust, sadness is mediated by a frontal-lobe that trades in pride, empathy, envy, embarrassment, guilt, and shame, with happiness as the emotion that operates across both brain areas. The 'secondary' emotions are much more 'rule-based' or 'situation-based' – our play, games and simulations operate as the medium whereby our basic emotions can be translated into manageable interpersonal and social phenomena.

Compared to Virno's 'potential human', fated to indecision in its very constititution, Sutton-Smith's 'adaptive potentiator' has a healthy dynamic in its use of play. For the latter, play is "a fortification against the disabilities of life. It transcends life’s distresses and boredoms and, in general, allows the individual or the group to substitute their own enjoyable, fun-filled, theatrics for other representations of reality in a tacit attempt to feel that life is worth living".

In the Sutton-Smith vision, play is not the soft spot whereby we are made into controllable "dividuals" by hyper-capitalism, but the resilient optimism out of which the very possibilities of societal difference are generated. Cultural policy, founded in this socio-biological vision, becomes a constructive exercise in building forms of simulation, combination, virtuosity and performance which exercise that deeply-rooted "neonatal optimism".

Yet isn't such a constitutive "optimism" just what the desiring-machines of Virno's info-capitalism most wishes to exploit? The answer returns power to the cultural policy-maker – but not via institutions which take their dominant character from an "industrial" age. Cultural institutions have to build those rich, public "grounds of play" in which the optimism of our species can flourish in a way which outflanks and surpasses any dominion that a powerfully calibrating control-society might assert.

In this, Dunlop and Galloway's distinction between "cultural" and "creative" becomes relevant again. How can distinctively cultural platforms enable, through artistic production, the kind of joyful, exhilarated freedom that surpasses the behaviour-calibration of the creative industries? For organisational inspiration, they could do worse that to attend to the peculiarly persistent linking of commons and dynamism that characterises the internet.

For neoteny's generation of play and playforms throughout the human life-span is one of the deeply constitutive processes shaping the design, functionality and culture of the internet. One epochal answer to our potentiating faculties that the internet could represent is that of an extension of the "ground of play" that we see across the higher complex mammals – that open but distantly monitored developmental zone of time, space and resource, where potentiating risks are taken by explorative, energetic organisms, in conditions where scarcity is held at bay.

Lion-cubs or chimps compelled to diversively play, risking injury and predation, but in a delimited zone with ultimate defenses; children in their local playground, enjoying their rough-and-tumble with solid equipment and open space, under some kind of municipal governance; all of us on the internet, improvising our sociality and extending our conviviality with powerful communication tools, resting on a complex but (so far) resilient infrastructure. All of these can be cast as complex-mammalian 'grounds of play', sharing three conditions – they are 1) loosely but robustly governed; 2) a surplus of time, space and materials is ensured; 3) failure, risk and mess is treated as necessary for development.

So the 'constitutive' power of play in humanity – that neoteny-driven potentiation that excites both autonomists and socio-biologists – seems to also require a 'constitutional' dimension: a protocol of governance securing certain material and emotional conditions, to enable a rich plurality of playforms. When Lessig speaks of the Net as an "innovation commons", the resonance with a socio-biological vision of the ground of play is clear. His idea that the internet represents an "architecture of value" is also homologous with these conditions for play: both are discernable zones of rough-and-tumble activity in which our social-ethical identities are forged. A cultural ecology where security and risk are in dynamic, mutually fruitful balance.

Of course, in the Scottish political context, the constitutional question is always a live issue. But a constitutional approach to the support of Scottish arts and culture, inspired organisationally by the Net, might begin to look beyond the very confines of cultural debate itself, and attend to those "material" and socio-economic conditions that would support a rich plurality of free expression.

Perhaps the best cultural policy for this doesn't lie at all with an arts body - but with housing, welfare, labour-market regulation and taxation. Cheap living rents, a creative enterprise allowance, a general nationwide policy of working hours reduction, and tax breaks for artists would generate the right balance of security and risk that supports healthy culture. Vibrant artistic scenes don't necessarily want a grant for their art - but they do want freedom to dispose of their time, talents and energies as they would choose to.

Those three conditions of a "ground of play" - loose but robust governance, an surplus of resources in time, space and materials, and an expectation that process is more important than outcome - maybe be more lastingly secured by a move towards a 21-hour week, as the New Economics Foundation proposes, than whatever a dedicated "arts, screen and creative industry" body could ever do (Coote, 2010). Helping to raise the floor of that basic social autonomy - not just for the creatives, but for their possible audiences and co-creators - may be the most effective measure to support the continuing development of Scottish culture.

References

Coote, A. (2010), 21 Hours: Why a shorter working week can help us all to flourish in the 21st century, London: New Economics Foundation, http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/21-hours

Damasio, A. (1994), Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, New York: G.P. Putman and Sons.

Galloway, S. and Dunlop, S. (2007), ‘A Critique of Definitions of the Cultural and Creative Industries in Public Policy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Vol. 13, No. 1.

Holloway, R. (2009), 'Creative Disobedience', Scottish Arts Council Position Paper, Edinburgh: Scottish Arts Council.

Roy, K. (2010), ‘A public body and SR’, Scottish Review, September 13^th, http://www.scottishreview.net/KRoyspecial19.shtml

Sutton-Smith, B. (2008), ‘Play Theory: A Personal Journey and New Thoughts’, American Journal of Play, Vol. 1, No.1, 80-123.

Virno, P. (2009), 'Natural-Historical Diagrams: the 'New Global' Movement and the Biological Invariant’, in Chiesa, L. and Toscano, A., (eds), The Italian Difference Between Nihilism and Biopolitics, Re-Press, http://3.ly/virno.

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.

* * *

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.

The Source of the Nile: Pat Kane review of Allan Brown's Nileism: the Strange Course of the Blue Nile

My review (for the Scottish Review of Books) of Allan Brown's excellent rock biography,  Nileism: The Strange Course of The Blue Nile. The book is a funny and sharp evocation of the rise of Glasgow's modern sensibility, via the tortured art of three musical obsessives.

* * *

The Source of the Nile

The music of the Blue Nile conjured a distinctive image of Glasgow in the 1980s.

Pat Kane, Scottish Review of Books, Vol 7, Issue 1, 2011

It’s a straightforward memory test: recall the music you listened to when you went to university or college. Try it; shut your eyes. And once you finally return to this page, has a recollection ever been so vivid? Have the physical details of a place, the faces and clothes and significant conversations and afternoons of passion, ever been so easily recalled?

The neuropsychologists would pedantically point out the reason why: the combination of a life beginning to be lived as a choosing, autonomous adult, with a youthful brain that’s still growing and ramifying, the switch stuck on “receive”. Which is why the texture of that malodorous couch is still on your fingertips, the first ever croissant still flaky in your mouth, the thrill of an enlivened intellect still electric inside you.

And music – that elaboration of a heartbeat, a mother’s croon, an innate sense of symmetry – just floods the memory circuits, like a red wine bottle tipped onto the crappy carpet of a rented flat. Goes everywhere; never really disappears.

For me, for Allan Brown, and for hundreds of thousands of others, one listen to any track from the Blue Nile’s 1984 debut album A Walk Across The Rooftops makes such a transportation possible. And although any reaction to any piece of music is subjective, it’s easy to tell a personal story about this record which makes a strong claim that it captured something objective, really out there.

To be a studious young Glaswegian male between 1981 and 1985 was to exist under roiling skies, shot through with occasional light: paranoid about being conscripted to fight in the Falklands, living a double life of intellectual demands in Garnethill and hometown mediocrity in Blairhill, yet beginning to explore a great city both in its streets and in your mind.

The city fathers hadn’t really discovered the joys of urban branding yet – the collective euphoria that a few well-chosen symbols, festival slogans and property developments could bring. The modernism, even futurism, that we brought to our student lives in Glasgow, was largely self-generated – and almost entirely based around music. Scottish post-punk was scattering its riches across the available media; which meant the NME, scraps of youth TV, John Peel at ten, and most crucially, Radio Clyde’s Billy Sloan on a Sunday evening.

When Sloan played the Blue Nile’s first single, 1981’s ‘I Love This Life’, I remember sitting bolt upright in my Coatbridge bed, instantly responding to Paul Buchanan’s reckless, slightly cracked swoon of a voice, to the bubbling serialism of Paul Moore and Robert Bell’s music – but perhaps most of all to its mood of bruised, weary romance, resting on a shimmering plane of electronica. A Walk Across the Rooftops confirmed it. In the Blue Nile I heard the dogged optimism, the growing dramatic arc, lurking behind my stumbling, day-time scholarly life in the big city – but set in a soundscape that (as the Edwin Morgan poetry collection from the 1970s put it) seemed to stretch from Glasgow to Saturn.

Via New York, it would also have to be said. Though far less crudely and directly than the late 1980s clutch of aspirational Glasgow bands, the Blue Nile channelled a towering, light-blinking imaginary Manhattan deep into their songs: ticker tape fluttering down from on high, tall buildings reaching up in vain, automobiles not cars, Glasgow-New York fused together as a tinseltown in the rain. 

As Paul Buchanan often admits in Nileism, ‘The music I had was what I inherited from my father and his tastes, which was Sinatra and that generation of singers, that American world.’ And out of all those who inescapably drank from that well, Buchanan has surely taken the richest draught: he combines the staggering ruin of the later Frank’s voice with the vaulting gospel ambition of a soul singer. Quite a combination.

But again, the bold, symphonic confidence of the Blue Nile’s electronica deconstructs all this Americana – makes it less like a clichéd trigger for emotion and excitement, and more like an abstract landscape of urban modernity that almost anyone could live in, and imagine their triumphs and failures, their ardencies and heartbreaks.

The first time I read Don DeLillo’s Libra, with Lee Harvey Oswald sitting on the A-train, I immediately heard the soundtrack coming from the Blue Nile: ‘The wheels touched off showers of blue-white sparks, tremendous hissing bursts, on the edge of no-control. People crowded in, every shape face in the book of faces. They pushed through the doors, they hung from the porcelain straps. He was riding just to ride. The noise had a power and a human force. The dark had a power. He stood at the front of the first car, hands flat against the glass.’ 

It’s maybe not such a presumptuous connotation: DeLillo’s latest book, Omega Point, begins and ends with a contemplation of Glasgow conceptualist Douglas Gordon’s 24-Hour Psycho. I’ve also just watched a YouTube interview with Paul Buchanan, quietly defending their glacial pace of four albums over 25 years to a jocose Irish presenter: ‘Try to think of them as novels.’

Easily done. One of the many delights of Allan Brown’s biography of the band is the way he allows himself enough literary pretension, amidst and between what is otherwise a conventional rock chronology of formation, relative success, and downward slide. This seems to be mostly shaped by his attempt to comprehend the inner dynamic of the band itself, ‘an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a raincoat’, a ‘hive mind’ which he sets himself the task to dissect. Music producer after svengali manager after record company executive relate the same experience of dealing with the Blue Nile: ‘It’s like they have a telepathy going between them’, says one factotum, ‘which it’s very difficult to break into.’

This tactical opacity made it difficult for them to conform to the ‘army manoeuvres’, as Brown correctly puts it, that conventional music business success requires: regular touring, albums every 18-24 months, relentless glad-handing of retailers and media, some commensuration between commercial revenue and recording budget.

He picks up on a phrase that the band delightedly pass among themselves – some overheard diddy in a bar in the 1980s, drawling ‘I’m in a band...as you probably know’ – and cites it as the core of their carnaptiousness. How do you make the purest, most considered modern music you can in a business best summed up by Hunter S. Thompson? ‘A cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.’

Well, you defend your autonomy as best you can. Part of this is the perennial musician’s ability to hunker down and minimally survive (the financial grace and favour of various girlfriends are mentioned in passing). But another part is lucking into the right context for making music: a physical place, or a trusted soundman, or a sympathetic small record label. Some defensible compound that can resist the harpies of promotion, so you can chase the sonics down the rabbit hole, and come up with something sui generis.

The Blue Nile’s mighty first two albums, A Walk Across the Rooftops (1982) and Hats (1989) were produced under exactly these conditions. I’m very pleased that Brown puts producer Calum Malcolm, and his converted-schoolroom studio in Pencaitland, at the heart of the Nile’s story. (My band Hue And Cry recorded two albums with Calum and I can attest to his genius). A somewhat bruised and elderly schoolboy in appearance, Malcolm took this bunch of disgruntled new techno-romantics and sat them down for listening sessions with Eastern European orchestras playing Bartok.

The title track of their first album is surely as evocative an opening sequence as the first few bars of Miles Davis’ ‘So What’ on Kind of Blue: you listen today and marvel at the sound of industrial-meets-post-industrial Glasgow wrenched out of the crudity of 1980s synthesizers. The company context was important too: the Blue Nile have always had a relationship with the recording label of the hi-fi manufacturer Linn, for whom perfection of sound was an absolute.

Yet the second half of Brown’s biography, covering their last two albums (1996’s Peace At Last and 2004’s High), is a familiar tale of how relative success can progressively unravel the delicate conditions that produce something of brilliance. Huge publishing deals were signed; their songs were covered by Rod Stewart and Annie Lennox; major American and London managers were signed up; lives started to be uncomfortably lived between LA and Glasgow; celebrity girlfriends were picked up (Rosanna Arquette).

Simmering tensions over musical direction also came to a head. For Peace At Last, acoustic guitars and gospel choirs rang out in expensive studios; on a stylistic pendulum swing, High is a dense, claustrophobic wall of digitality, apparently recorded in a control room where keyboard player Paul Moore would look only at his computer screen.

‘You have to remember that we were just three panic-stricken guys’, says Buchanan, the only member who consented to be interviewed for the book. ‘If we were full of confidence, the records wouldn’t have the ambivalence that attracts people.’ Their last kick-ass manager, Dire Straits’ Ed Bicknell, who knocked down doors to provide them with six-figure sums to finish their most recent recordings, says ‘the history of the Blue Nile was the most screwed-up I had ever encountered.’

In 2011, where organised noise has to contend with every other attraction in the media sensorium (and is having the financial nexus ripped out of it by downloading), the tale of the Blue Nile – total musical visionaries facing down the cash-rich 1980s and 1990s music business, and mostly winning – seems like ancient and glorious history.

But better this Nileism than the alternative, that’s for sure. One would hope that there are still young Glaswegians staring moodily out of the top windows of their student flat, in the city’s university district; and that somewhere, coiled deep within their Garageband software and infinitely capacious hard-drives, they are planning to take another sonic walk across those rooftops.

NILEISM – THE STRANGE COURSE OF THE BLUE NILE

Allan Brown

POLYGON, £14.99 224PP 

ISBN 1846971381

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. 

* * *

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. 

* * *

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?"

Envisioning Real Scotlands - Pat Kane column for Newsnet Scotland / Bella Caledonia

 

 Here's my column for the Bella Caledonia / Newsnet series "Hopes and Visions", asking political writers and commentators on their perspectives on 2011. Some great comments on the Newsnet Scotland page where it's posted. 

* * *

Envisioning Real Scotlands

Pat Kane

Hopes, visions - and fears - for 2011 in Scotland? Certainly, the prospect of a Labour-dominated Scottish Parliament after the May elections has a strange, deadening feel to it. Observing the half-hearted constitutional contortions of the Calman Bill, with its eccentric repatriations of powers to Holyrood and its anaemic concessions on fiscal powers, shows how punctured and empty the Unionist imagination is (never mind the extinction of the federal spirit of Scottish Liberals).

But the spectacle of a Scottish Parliament slowed to a stunned snail's pace, kept quiescent as the Westminster Labour Party works on disaffected Lib-Dem voters and MPs to unravel or challenge the Coalition over the next few years, is deeply depressing.

How can it be avoided? The nature and extent of the SNP's hold over the popular imagination in Scotland, after four years of minority government, has to be directly addressed. Are they perceived as only a Tartanised version of Peter Oborne's "political classes", with at least some of the taint of the Westminster expenses scandal, of complacency about the financialisation of our economy, of white-elephant creating (for Millennium Dome and Nesta read the Gathering and the Saltire Prize) while glaring inequalities in Scottish communities exist?

Or, alternately, do they still display that attractive zeal and ambition in the promotion of a distinctive "Scottish Way" - in which education has a comprehensive and inclusive dimension, in which health is kept apart from market mechanisms, in which the natural resources and beauty of the country are developed and harnessed, in which values of justice, participation and equity are still explicit (the Jimmy Reid question) - but which only sharpens their critique of the limited powers of the Parliament?

Yes, there will be engagement in a numbers game over the use and deployment of public-sector employees, or about our relatively successful economic record amidst recession - that is, statistics will be used to verify the managerial competence of the SNP government. Will "defending a record" be enough to solidify the Nationalists as the "party of Scottish progress" in the minds of voters? A Polly Toynbee / David Walker-style reckoning of the SNPs governmental record will undoubtedly be a very political piece of research, if and when it appears over the next five months. And yes, abstract and romantic appeals to national sovereignty, draped in Saltires with rolling hills in the background, will doubtless be evoked.

But there is a bigger credibility gap for the SNP to fill than these trusted techniques can address.  A high wave of policy innovation might do it. But it's not as if there isn't quite a lot of material there already, not all of it readily developable. The discussion about macro-level economic powers has moved from the National Conversation and the Independence Bill with its carefully laid-out economic powers, to the business-driven, cross-ideological debate about fiscal autonomy - but with an undoubted hole blown in the side of the discourse by the Crash, and the easily lampooned "Arc of Prosperity/Arc of Insolvency" headline.

That the SNP should have some well-worked out and authoritative economic briefing to cope with the "an-Independent-Scotland-would-have-been-crushed-by-the-Crash" charge is obvious. If it doesn't appear quickly and soon, with some powerful and authoritative backing, they will be permanently vulnerable to the charge.

A countervailing and positive strategy is to present a convincing enterprise case for full taxation, borrowing and regulatory powers. The green-energy and -tech sector is still the strongest synthesis of so many of these different elements of Scottish progress - native talent, natural resource, and the need for control over market conditions that create incentives for innovation and dynamism in this area. But green dynamism has to be made concrete at the level of non-entrepreneur-class jobs - retrofitting, infrastructural projects, sustainable community development.

And green lifestyle - the aspirational desire to live healthier, more self-providing, more convivial and sociable lives - has not been inspiringly evoked by an SNP leadership, which seems a little too comfortable with business lunches and ministerial chauffeuring. Again, those invoking visions of Scotland as a progressive environmental society have to be careful to walk - rather than waddle - their talk.

I would love the SNP to start "envisioning real utopias", in the words of the Swedish social theorist Erik Olin Wright. This is a process in which institutional reforms and creations, aimed at practically improving the immediate conditions of citizens, are also heading towards the egalitarian horizons represented by the late Jimmy Reid's phrase, "the rat race is for rats".

As a socialist who wants to promote the "social power" of democratic and collective self-determination, in dominance over economic power and state power, Wright's specific policy suggestions may seem challenging: Argentina's participatory budgets; Quebec's Solidarity funds; Wikipedia as a new model of collective investment in knowledge; workers' cooperatives (according to the Mondragon model); and a guaranteed social wage (to support the care economy).

But I wonder whether there is a way that a solid campaign strategy of "defending and extending our achievements" within the devolutionary framework, can be combined with something a bit more experimental and futuristic. Perhaps an attempt to anticipate the kinds of new lifestyles, institutions, possibilities and services that would be possible with maximum attainable political and economic autonomy (or independence).

In the style of the wildly-successful online conference, one might imagine it as TEDIndependence - a range of short web presentations which take as their premise an independent Scotland, and imagine (or imagineer) what would be practically possible within that settlement. The lightness and accessibility of the TED style would place it in a different realm from the argy-bargy of character assassination that seems to be the coming tactic of the Scottish Labour campaign.

It could also connect with ambitious, conversation-setting knowledge workers, and the newly mobilised student movements too. One might imagine TEDIndependence Salons, where (as in the Obama campaign) people were encouraged to gather in others' homes and communities with these videos as a starting-point for discussion.

We must always be wary of the American technology critic Evgeny Morozov called the "Net Delusion" when it comes to political organisation: these suggestions would only be an amplification of the kinds of real-world doorstepping and street activism that still makes up the sinews of a political movement. But the central ambition for using social media in this way - that independence should be about disciplined but imaginative leaps into one's own future - is still best expressed by Alasdair Gray: "work as if you were in the early days of a better nation".

Independence at the state level has to be rooted in autonomy and self-determination at the individual and community level. Ministers might do well to remember what it took to get them there, in order that they might have a chance of a second bite at the apple of Scottish freedom.

 

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.

 

* * *

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: Between the Parliament Building & a Piper's Hall, the Scottish Left muses on its future

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - where I attended two political conferences in a week, both of them illuminating about where the nationally-oriented Left is going in Scotland, coming up to the May elections for Holyrood. Old comrades reconnected with, new ideas freely circulated. All comments welcome.

* * *

That was a very political week for me: a welcome respite from thinking about bytes and notes. The two events I spoke at - the first at our still-glorious Parliament building, the second in a piper's hall in Glasgow - covered the bases of progressive politics in Scottish public life.

It was fascinating to be at the "Politics of Devolution" conference in Holyrood - especially for someone who's already crossed the line towards desiring a Scottish nation-state. I was most intrigued by those politicians attending who really wanted regional devolution to work, but expressed a tangible frustration that Westminster was deeply uninterested in the whole business.

 Ex-First Minister Henry McLeish declared himself "a radically reformist Unionist" - but his anger at the condescension he received from his own party in the hey-days of New Labour was palpable. The former Welsh First Minister Rhodri Morgan told a fascinating tale of his Assembly's adoption of Scandinavian-style extended kindergartens for early-years education. Yet, as he put it, "London ministers would go to Finland to see how it works, and never realise that we had taken the same decision two or three hours along the motorway". 

The impressive Northern Irish ex-Speaker Lord Allardyce - whose soothing manner was explained by his prior career as a medical psychologist - noted how early institutions like the Council of the Isles never really fulfilled their devolutionary potential: a new and inclusive "Unionism of the archipelago" had withered on the vine of London indifference, even antipathy. More than once, the politicians quoted the American Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who thought that American state legislatures could be "laboratories of democracy", providing innovations for the Federal government. But their general mood was that any innovation brought forth to the great Palace would be either ignored, resented or patronised.

On the other side, some speakers complained - particularly in terms of Scottish economics - that devolution was too successful. In the go-go years of a British exchequer pumped up with the revenues from financial speculation, the "Barnett consequentials" - the proportionate size of the Scottish block grant - were automatically inflated by the speculative bounty. Economist David Heald suggested that the Scottish economy didn't have enough "absorptive capacity" to deal with the billions of cash coming down the pipeline.

What I think Heald meant is that successive Scottish governments were able to expand the public sector and their services without any real connection to the country's underlying economic capacity. Which, of course, is the business-leaders-and-SNP-and-some-Tories case for fiscal autonomy: they want a situation where all the elements of income, debt, investment and expenditure can be centrally managed in Scotland, rather than strewn opaquely across various reserved and unreserved powers. (In its contorted structure, the Calman proposals got pretty short shrift all round here).

I left the event feeling strangely sorry for the attendees. For all their smarts, they were unable to plot a path towards the German or American-style federalism (aided by more, but unlikely, English regionalism) that would somehow retain the political Union of Britain. Yet they were entirely unwilling to see Scottish nationhood in the context of any other "Union" - Celtic, Nordic, European or wider - that might allow for, perhaps, a clearer and more coherent expression of self-government.

A few days later, an entirely different event - where the experience was not so much that of swanning around the biomorphic spaces of Miralles' Parliament, but of unforgivng rows of seats facing the tartan-framed stage of the National Piping Centre in Glasgow's Cowcaddens. The Scottish Independence Convention - a doughty attempt by the esteemed ex-Herald writer Murray Ritchie to create a broad, non-party space for independence supporters - was running its "Positively Independent" conference. With Elaine C. Smith in the chair - funny and politically articulate - it was hardly going to be a dour affair.

But neither was it tub-thumping ur-Nationalism. What I'd forgotten (note to self: develop input from Holyrood politics beyond the pompous perpetual-student hustings of First Minister's Questions on podcast) was the Red-Green dimension to sovereignty politics in Scotland. As you scanned the list of parties at the bottom of the flyer, it would be difficult not to wince as your eyes passed over the logo of the Scottish Socialist Party. I enjoyed Green MSP Patrick Harvie's warning the other day, as George Galloway makes noises about entering the Scottish Parliament on a wave of libel cash and talk-radio fame, that the last thing socialism in Scotland needs is "another tanned ego hellbent on splitting the vote".

But for the overall non-Labour Left in Scotland, it's a gey sore yin at the moment. Friends of ours from Stuttgart told us the other week how powerful the German Greens are becoming. According to Business Week, Greens have become "sexy", garnering the support of "the intellectual urban middle class - the latte macchiatos, the Mac users, the iPhone users", and are now credibly vying to be coalition partners in the next German government.

 If we briefly forget those events which conspired (and perhaps perspired) against them, we can propose a counter-factual history for the left in Scotland: an SSP-Green bloc gathering momentum in Holyrood from the mid 2000's. In this universe, they would have been in the position to exploit both the Great Slump of finance, and the Coming Storm of climate change, and become a possible coalition-partner to the SNP - which itself would, going by recent behaviour, have been hospitable to such an alliance (given their "Progressive Rainbow" proposals at the last Westminster election).

But with every sales-busting cover of the Daily Record at the moment, that alluring universe - like the briefest of events in a Hadron Collider - goes pop! if you even think about it.

So while many of the presentations were properly stimulating - Mike Small on a low-carbon prospectus for Scottish independence, Joan McAlpine explaining the relative aversion of women to independence, Mike Danton on a new small-banking sector for the Scottish economy, Kevin Williamson on e-democracy - for me there was a certain wistfulness to the whole day.

In my own contribution, I ended up wondering whether our invocations of the late Jimmy Reid in recent months were entirely in good faith. Was it currently imaginable that an occupational group - like the UCS workers-in - could constructively challenge the commercial or strategic logic of their organisation from the inside? How much of the debate about the Scottish future gazes vertically upon Glorious Leaderships of various kinds - and how lacking are we in horizontal activisms that could make independence seem more deeply rooted in everyday empowerment, and more than just a shuffling of the managerial elites?

I'm becoming increasingly interested in the Green perspective on local empowerment and self-production. But surely what's inspirational about politics in Scotland is the "social concertation" that's possible in a small nation: the way we can connect our micro-activisms and idealisms with our macro-policies and structures. That's the vision of a land-reformed, democratically-intellectual, non-nuclear/pro-green, inventive and egalitarian Scotland which has motivated some of us for too many years to comfortably count.

And whatever national conversations we try to hold, if they're not conducted between the well-padded governing classes in a near-enough state building, and the exuberant, do-it-yourself activists in a piper's hall, they're not worth having.

 For more on Scottish Affairs, visit Pat Kane's ideas-blog Thoughtland

Map of Thoughtland: Urban Learning Space [archive]

Urban Learning Space was established with core funding from Scottish Enterprise Glasgow. We are working with people around Scotland to address real life challenges. Our network of experts are using transformational design practice to promote individuals' capacities for change. Nurturing an innate capacity for learning by using collaborative design processes, we create new approaches. These range from the building of creativity tools to support innovation, transforming public spaces into learning landscapes, and harnessing emerging technologies to explore new learning contexts

via www.labgroup.org.uk

 

Strange what the Net can recover. Thoughtland was involved in a vibrant, Glasgow-based think-tank called Urban Learning Space in the mid-2000's, which was funded to explore new kinds of technology-enabled learning in city environments.

Closed down in 2009, we decided on a whim to see what traces remained... and found this archive of podcasts of their seminar series from its final years. Presentations by the futurist Michel Bauwens, ex-Microsoft guru Chris Yapp, and the educationalist Stephen Heppell are particularly useful. Download them before a gust of digital wind blows them finally away.

Map of Thoughtland: Architecture + Design Scotland

 
Architecture and Design Scotland (A+DS) is Scotland's champion for excellence in placemaking, architecture and planning. We are an Executive NDPB of the Scottish Government. A+DS aims to support the creation of places that work, which provide people with real choices and, are ultimately, places where people want to be.

We champion the highest standards in architecture and placemaking across all sectors, advocating a better understanding of the importance of quality design in both the public and private sectors.

via www.ads.org.uk

Coming to our attention via their current show at The Lighthouse, Architecture and Design Scotland are an officially recognised champion of architecture and design, complementary (we imagine) to the RIAS. They have a steadily accumulating Reports and Studies section. 

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. 

Map of Thoughtland: Better Nation

Welcome to Better Nation, our new Scottish blog, built on four things its editors share: a love of ideas, an essential optimism, an anoraky obsession with politics, and a particular interest in the nation of Scotland – as it has been, as it stands now, and its future prospects.

The title comes from Dennis Lee, famously quoted by Alasdair Gray (and attributed to Gray on the walls of Holyrood itself): “Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation”. The three of us believe devolution has been a pretty successful endeavour thus far, but that the current constitutional arrangements are unlikely to be the final settled will of the Scottish people.

As a result, it is already a better nation than it was when the Vigil camped out under Calton Hill, but even the most cursory glance around Scotland shows continued poverty, movement away from sustainability, a business sector hardly thriving, a nervous public sector, stretched voluntary organisations and shortcomings in our democracy.

via www.betternation.org

Better Nation is a very healthy sign of the new Scottish ideas-blogosphere - two Green-aligned (but SNP friendly) and one PhD student interested in autonomous movements, turning their pub and phone discussions into a very useful and thoughtful platform for Scottish self-determinist issues. Greens in Scotland are an interesting force - advocates of independence, but critical of the SNP's mainstream economic, energy and infrastructure policies. This will be a space to watch. 

Pat Kane's CalMerc column: Referees should get militant towards the football cashocracy

Here's my latest column for the Caledonian Mercury - a substantial complaint about the whole "crisis of refereeing" in Scotland and English football - partly informed by my impatience with the over-moneyed laddism of the game, partly by my understanding of play and games from The Play Ethic. Intemperate in places, but still worth writing. All comments welcome.

***

As a from-the-cradle Celtic supporter, and general lover of the physical interplay between men wearing shorts, there are many occasions on which I have felt like giving up on football entirely.

For example, being caught in a riotous train carriage around 5.45 on an Old Firm Saturday afternoon, trying to insulate a terrified daughter from the window-hammering and abusive roister-doister.

Or realising the sheer working-class exploitation involved in today's game, as another wave of high-margin merchandise cascades out from enterprises that are now more like lifestyle brands, or huckster pseudo-religions, than the sporting expression of a community.

Or recalling one particularly memorable sequence from BBC Scotland's Saturday Sportsound, in which the notion of women's football was so biliously abused that you'd have thought a time machine had whisked you back forty years.

But I must admit that the current so-called 'referees crisis' in Scottish (and English) football is pushing me closer to the edge than I've ever been - to a point where no update of the Cryuff turn from some exuberant global traveller (or pale-faced local youngster) can bring me back to the fold, as it usually does.

Listening to the accusations and counter-accusations surrounding the non-awarding of a penalty in a recent Celtic-Dundee United match is like stumbling into some equally pointless dispute between white-collars in a Friday night theme bar, bitching about water-cooler politics.

The German philosopher Theodor Adorno made the salient point 50 years ago: what was most tragic about the "leisure-and-recreation" afforded to the workers was that it reinforced the very bureaucracy and administration from which they were supposedly seeking escape.

Complaints about uninspiring managers and "passenger" players - or adulation of wonder-coaches and expensive paragons - mimic the very positional wars, ambient resentment and career-politicking that goes on in the average "people-oriented" organisation. Never was a "game" more joylessly and grimly experienced.

But what really raises the refereeing crisis above the usual ethical mediocrity of football culture is the sheer idiocy of its premise: that powerful clubs, with high financial stakes riding on any victory, should be allowed to subvert the authority of the refereeing profession.

Who could deny that referees occasionally get it wrong, in the sturm und drang of the average game? North London is currently gripped by the obvious referee-and-linesman blunder in a Man United vs. Spurs match, captured in all its glory on YouTube, where a clearly-visible Man U hand-ball was ignored for the sake of advantage, leading to a klutzy (but decisive) goal against Spurs.

The Celtic complaint against the referee's on-the-day call has been further muddied by rancour and misinformation between the officials themselves, leading to resignations and legalistic clarifications. Columnists intone about "chaos" and "mismanagement" in the Scottish Football Association. Storm clouds gather.

Oh please. What infuriates me most about these disputes is the spectacle of sportsmen, with laptops or without, unable to comprehend the very nature of the phenomenon they are involved in.

Gentlemen (raps knuckles three times on each closely-shaven head): What is a game, football or otherwise? It is the agreement to compete (and within each team, collaborate) under a series of mutually-agreed rules, involving physical movement and equipment, in a set-apart space and under specific time-limits, with a points-scoring mechanism that can bring about clear victory. 

Do you know what you need for the very essence of a game to proceed? You need a referee, and the backing of an adjudicating institution, to enforce those rules and conditions.

Here's a thought experiment: what do you have if you don't have a referee? Well, you have what the philosopher James Carse called an infinite game, rather than a finite game. A finite game is aimed at victory under precise and agreed conditions. An infinite game is played in order to keep the game going, to adapt it to bring new people in, to create new rules as you go along.

When children extend their wonderful phantasmagorias, or when hackers and makers contribute enthusiastically to the commons of the internet, - well, those are games of culture and creation that need no refereeing. Or at best, there is a distribution of refereeing among the players themselves, who are relaxed and capacious enough to flip between the two roles.

In my studies of play over the years, I've met many people who advocate the infinite game - beautiful souls all of them. Probably not welcome in any commentary booth soon.

Is there a football equivalent of the infinite game? About the only example I've ever seen are those classic Brazilian beach clips, where three players in the round find ever more improvisational and gravity-defying ways to toss the ball between each other.

I've often wondered whether those sublime skills could be combined with the creation of customised rules, specific to each performance - forging a new art-sport, perhaps more akin to a gymnastics or dance display, in the spirit of capoiera's stylized fighting. Bill Shankly's working-class ballet, taken literally.

But short of punter-imploding innovations like that, we have what we have. That is, football as a money-pumped, gladiatorial, super-globalized and hyper-performing brand war. Now, we've recently become aware of how intrinsically unintelligent capitalism can be - where the very evasion or loosening of market regulation by ambitious, authority-shaping financial players threatens to unravel the very possibility of commercial exchange itself.

Funny enough, in a sport that has become at the top level a kind of ultimate status-display between barely-legal billionaires, they've ended up doing the same thing: heaping abuse and wreaking subversion on a class of underpaid enthusiasts, whose only crime (other than the expected occasional deviations from professional self-discipline) is to make the very game that they're playing intrinsically possible.

As feckless mercenaries and performance-haunted coaches bear down on the men in black, whether surrounding and intimidating them on the park or in the media, it doesn't remotely surprise me that those referees are increasingly making bad calls, or are falteringly getting their stories straight among themselves. They're rattled to their core - and they completely shouldn't be.

At the very least, they should be getting the same respect as rugby referees. I'd even welcome goal-line technology, if it liberated referees and linesmen to deal with the melodramatic, spiritually-bereft diving and faking that comprises at least half of the competitive tactics of the modern football game.

But I support the referee class, and all measures to boost their professionalism and earnings - particularly in the face of a club culture that's become bloated and swaggering under the many billions pouring in from the passive spectatorship and consumption of the Murdoch-entranced, mostly male masses.

And if they don't get the respect they deserve, like the Portuguese refs they should militantly go on strike, for as long as it takes to get it back. Then the football cashocracy will understand what a finite game really means.

For more on Scottish affairs from Pat Kane, see his ideas-blog Thoughtland