NOSTALGIA is a feeling that lingers inside you, like a cloud of smoke you can’t dispel. It’s an interesting question to ask yourself: what do you feel nostalgic about?
Spontaneously, my own response is: radical bookshops. As a GlasgowUniversity student in the 80s, I used to drift between about six of them, studding the town centre and the West End.
HISTORY and the heart are inextricable. It’s the particular weave between them that often underpins our surface debates and politics. It’s about the grand narratives we choose, and the deep emotions they answer.
This struck me strongly when reading Andrew Wilson’s column earlier this week. Andrew specified those Scots voters born in the remainder of the UK (or rUK), who value their British identity, as a crucial constituency to win over in any coming democratic event (in 2014, out of nearly half a million of this type in total, 72% of them voted No).
THE story passed down about my Gran Kane was that she snarled at the mention of Winston Churchill.
One of her Irish family was murdered by a member of the Black and Tans, a regiment Churchill formed when he was British secretary of war in 1919. Recruited largely from shell-shocked Great War soldiers, the Black and Tans struck terror into rebellious Nationalist communities in the North of Ireland.
So even before I became a perfidious independista, inherently sceptical of the call to “Great British” anything, we had a familial line on the great war hero Winston Churchill.
BREXIT gets weirder and weirder. And you can rely on the bookies to put a price on it. A few days ago, Paddy Power opened a line on “what the British Government would officially ration first in 2019”. Fuel came top at 4/1, olive oil and bread at 16/1, chicken 66/1, prosecco 125/1.
Next in my twitstream (never better named) was a punter vox-popped by the BBC. Asked about retailers’ warnings of empty shelves after a no-deal Brexit, he suggested that, as far as he was concerned, “it would do the country good to go without for a little while. Make them appreciate what they’ve had”.
BETWEEN two bookshops – Waterstones in Sauchiehall Street, and Foyles in London – I have just blitzed Xmas.
All other retail experiences fall upon me like a plague of boils. But wandering round these bookshelves – taking a single hour to do each comfortable shop, picking items exactly appropriate for each recipient – has nearly made me a fan of consumer capitalism again.
I HAD to check a few times on Netflix, but yes it’s there. In its opening credits, David Mackenzie’s fascinating film about the degradation and redemption of Robert the Bruce spells its title precisely this way: Outlaw/King.
To my mind, that slash (and yes, there are many other forms of slashing in this gorefest) makes intellectually explicit what is the movie’s implicit theme.
If you are a national community residing within a bigger polity, to what extent should its leaders seek progress (or even maintenance) within the rules – or by challenging the rules themselves? Are you king or Outlaw? Or does that slash indicate how one stance might modulate back and forth with the other, according to circumstances?
THE tweets went round, a little less desultory than usual: “I suppose this seems like a BBC Question Time (#bbcqt) I might watch this week.” And indeed, Thursday’s show – its cast-list scattered all over the HolyroodParliament chamber – looked as if it might rub cliches together vigorously enough to catch some flame.
A strangulated editor of the Spectator, a Duracell-powered young Scots Tory, the near-papal Michael Russell, a Celebrity Who’s Clearly Getting Out Of Here, and Val McDermid (representing literature and humans). Plus a “diverse” audience which we now know is carefully assembled by an “audience producer” (with equally carefully placed “star turns”, in case the pabulum threatens to choke us all). Haud me back.
THERE’S no doubting the power, symbolic or otherwise, of a mighty bridge. Earlier this week, we saw the initial sketches of a proposal to link up Scotland and Northern Ireland. The shorter option is between the Mull of Kintyre and Torr Head; the longer, between Portpatrick and Larne.
The pencilled impression of the “Celtic Bridge” suggests a design that’s like a copy-and-paste of the Queensferry Crossing over the Forth. Like that bridge, many “cable stays” peak and trough their way across the Irish Sea. But the artist puts it all in scale by sketching in a family, plowtering about on a harbour beach, gazing out at the massive structure.
I NOTICED them when they started to appear, several years ago: little blue Saltires on packs of food in mega-supermarkets. A flag is meant to catch your eye, and catch your heart, and both happened to me.
If the first half of your adult life has been about wanting your country to gain self-confidence, and get the recognition it deserves – then yes, you notice these wee things.
GEORGE Monbiot’s new book, Out of The Wreckage: A New Politics For An Age of Crisis, should be of great interest to anyone with political ambitions to change their country – whatever country that is.
His core idea is that human beings crave powerful stories to make sense of their lives. No matter the facts they corral, any effective politics must have such a story. Monbiot says the most shaping ones are “restoration” tales – heroes coming to repair the collective damage left by identifiable villains.
SO it seems that Banksy’s Balloon Girl – from a shortlist compiled by “art experts”, via a poll commissioned by a tech company – has been chosen as the best-loved artwork of these islands.
The harrumphing has already started (and with Jack Vettriano’s The Singing Butler at three, and Jamie Reid’s Never Mind the Bollocks album cover at 20, it will undoubtedly continue). There is enough Turner, Hockey, Moore, Gormley and Constable in the list to placate the art police (though I assume the Scots-beloved Joan Eardley was nowhere on the list).
But I am intrigued that a piece of spray-painted, sentimental street-art – from a self-proclaimed “political” artist – has topped this list. If you wanted to make Balloon Girl an indicator of our collective mood, it would be easy to do.
IT’S hard to take all these WWII movies, as Brexit staggers towards its awkward, broken conclusion.
Before the end of 2017, we will have seen Their Finest (a romantic comedy about wartime filmmaking), two Churchill movies (played by Brian Cox and, in November, by Gary Oldman), and now Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Ridley Scott’s Battle of Britain will land on us in 2018.
IT’S crazy out there, no doubt about it. Hard to know how to orient yourself, in what sometimes feels like a rattling-apart of many established structures.
In this moment, I think there are psychological benefits in pursuing Scottish indy politics. It allows you to grab on to some of the biggest topics – economy, technology, energy, welfare, the utility of force – and at least connect them to some real democratic forces.
‘I BELIEVE we can build a more secure and united nation by taking action against the extremists who seek to divide us, and standing up to the separatists who wish to tear our country apart.”
I guess the first are Corbyn and his lefties. But is the second me? Or you? Or are we both of these terms? And what will “taking action against” or “standing up to” involve, precisely?
‘STRONG and stable leadership... strong and stable leadership...” Theresa May used the term 14 times during her first General Election stump speech, and incessantly throughout the day. We’ve received the message, Prime Minister.
Or, more exactly, we’ve received the message of her master strategist Lynton Crosby, and he didn’t get to where he is today by underestimating the need to drive a campaign line home, like a nail through the head of the distracted citizenry.
AND yet we realised: Hatred, even of meanness Contorts the features. Anger, even against injustice Makes the voice hoarse. O, We who wanted to prepare The ground for friendship Could not ourselves be friendly.
– Bertolt Brecht, To Those Born Later”
THESE lines have been running through my head, since the First Minister gravely announced her timetable for a second independence referendum. How can this binary, fundamental, what-kind-of-society-are-we choice become a “friendly” process, this time round?
IT’S not often you get the chance to be involved in the launch of a new political force. But I took it this week, as one of the co-initiators of The Alternative UK (www.thealternative.org.uk), inspired by and connected to Denmark’s Alternativet party, which describes itself as being for “sustainability and entrepreneurship”.
Our soft launch in London was full of the diversity, energy and global embrace which that world city can provide, and which always makes this Scot welcome. (It also shows what a bum steer Mayor Khan was given by his Scottish comrades recently).
IT’S the stat that drew a collective intake of breath at the Build Indy conference last week.
And throughout Dr Craig Dalzell’s vital paper The Demographics of Independence, it’s the one he’s most anxious about: “The underlying reasons … should be investigated immediately”.
Here it is: Support for indy among women over 55 has dropped from 44 per cent in 2014 to 22 per cent in 2016. “The idea of the UK leaving the EU appears to have affected this group profoundly, as their leaving the Yes group has not resulted in a rise in the undecided vote,” says Dalzell. “Instead, there has been a movement straight to No.”
"A LITTLE girl of seventeen in a mental hospital told me she was terrified because the Atom Bomb was inside her. That is a delusion. The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from 'reality' than many of the people on whom the label 'psychotic' is affixed."
As The Donald inches closer to the nuclear launch codes, this quote from the late Scottish anti-psychiatrist and 1960s guru RD Laing has been rattling around my head. Mad To Be Normal is the title of the biopic of Laing’s life (with David Tennant in the main role) that will close the Glasgow Film Festival this year.
A FEW weekends ago, Michael Gove MP, a notable friend of this mighty organ, took the chance to clarify his famous “the people have had enough of experts” statement from the Brexit campaign.
“The point I make is that not all experts are wrong, that’s manifestly nonsense. [There’s] expert engineers, expert doctors, expert physicists,” he told the BBC’s Andrew Marr. “But there are a sub-class of experts, particularly economists, pollsters, social scientists, who really do have to reflect on some of the mistakes that they’ve made.”
The James Bond circus is kicking into life again. Spectre, the next blockbuster in the Ian-Fleming-based franchise, hits our screens in October. Already, the trailers throb with impeccable tailoring, sportscars used as guided missiles, and purring, Euro-accented superbaddies, with Daniel Craig looking more and more like one giant knuckle wrapped in a white tuxedo.
Since I was of an age to watch them, I’ve rarely missed a Bond movie. But like most thoughtful modern male viewers, our boyish nostalgia-trips have to be increasingly diluted by critical and historical awareness. Beneath its customary wit and glamorous violence, we’d be right to be both shaken and stirred by the undercurrents in a Bond movie.
The scholars have come to a settled judgement on Fleming’s original Bond novels: they were a pop-cultural compensation for British imperial decline. At the mid-fifties height of American Cold War power, and with debacles like Suez still fresh in the mind, Bond took the lead in fighting cat-stroking international baddies. The US agents were - of course! - firmly subservient.
This was also a Britain still marked by post-war austerity. Bond’s mix of sex and snobbery - the right suits, drinks and gentleman’s club rituals, leavened with episodes of briskly-executed lust - proved irresistible to millions of readers, mired in the daily grind. (Scotland’s Mark Millar had huge fun in last year’s Kingsman, showing how manners - not breeding - maketh the rapacious, well-tailored killer…especially if he starts out as a kid from the schemes).
The Bond movie franchise seems to refresh itself for every era. 2013’s Skyfall was the biggest grossing UK film ever made, and one of the 14 that have ever grossed over £1billion worldwide. Something still must be clicking.
At least on these islands, the continuities are a little depressing: the boxes of austerity and post-imperial angst are still eminently tickable. Humdrum white-collar company men (or GQ buyers) continue to tingle at the sheer masculinity-max of it all, susceptible to the merchandise (cars, watches, perfumes, clothes, mobile phones) that may get them a step closer to Bondhood.
And the UK establishment still pathetically yearns to punch above its (feather) weight - dropping bombs to clean up its messes in the Middle East, commissioning nukes to cling onto its geopolitical status, sticking close to US foreign policy. Surely, if the UK took a more progressive and modest global role, some key sinews of credibility would snap for the Bond franchise. For many of its global viewers, the bathos of the super-Brit’s action-heroics must veer a little close to Austin Powers territory already.
There’s no doubt that, ideologically, Skyfall pushed open the cracks in the Bond facade; director Sam Mendes got some of his North London liberal-left fingers in. The scenes of soldier’s coffins draped with Union Jacks; the bombing of the top terrace of MI6 building at London’s Embankment; the hauling of M (Judi Dench) before the press to “account” for her failures.
And as is the self-referential way of things these days, Skyfall’s final battle scenes take place on Bond’s Scottish estate. This is accurate to the Ian Fleming legacy (his grandfather was a Scottish merchant and financier from Dundee). It’s also doubtless a nod to Sean Connery, whose Bond performance spent half its time raising eyebrows at the very Englishness it was supposed to exemplify.
The trailer clips and story outline for the forthcoming movie, Spectre, highlight another, more universal attraction of the Bond-world, beyond these piddling island insecurities. As any 007 fan will know, Spectre stands for “Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion”; its logo is the octopus, classic symbol of a monstrous controller with many tendrils of power.
Fleming originally dreamt up Spectre in the early 60’s because he didn’t want to date his novels in the Cold War (which he believed, at the time, might end quite soon). But of course, the “secret international conspiracy” has a long and fetid history.
For those who wish to critically analyze and challenge the dominant power structures from below, conspiracy thinking is a moment of intellectual weakness. The operations of media, finance, government and army/police seem so implacable and interlocked, so resistant to democracy or protest, that the only explanation must be a shadowy group of powerful coordinators across all sectors - the “Jewish Lobby”, Davos, the Bilderberg Group, David Icke’s lizards…or indeed, some other “spectre”.
So, as one megalomaniac mogul after yet another criminal network attempts to suborn the “free world”, Bond crashes, shoots, fights, shags, schmoozes and gadgets his way across all five continents. Usually coming face to face with these evil technocrats at the end of every movie, Bond brings them down through a warrior’s skill and cunning. Hurrah! Yeah, right.
Daniel Craig’s take on Bond resonates with the present because, it seems to me, he embodies our ambivalence about enjoying the (temporary) victory of one warrior against the system. Has a Bond body ever been so buff and objectified, but also so battered and even tortured, as his? Craig’s Bond is constantly on the verge of leaving the job, with dependencies and weaknesses roiling under the tuxedo’d swagger.
Of course, with Aston Martins hurtling through the air, and long snogs with Monica Bellucci on tap, this is called having your self-critical cake and eating it. You might think that one further nail in the Bond coffin would be the era of digital whistleblowing. Assange, Manning and Snowden have revealed the extra-judicial behaviours of those less cuff-linked than Bond.
But they’ve also shown that we live in a networked society which could enable a potentially infinite surveillance. Crunch enough big data, and you can despatch a drone to take out the Blofield equivalents. And as some monitoring of cloud activity has shown, you can even anticipate where the trouble will begin in the first place - before the “troublemakers” even properly get their act together.
007 lives perpetually in the shadows - and one of the guilty thrills of Bond over these many decades has been to watch how nakedly power can operate, beyond accountability of any kind. Yet the times have profoundly changed.
I wonder whether Mendes, or any director, will expose a 21st century Bond to the world of sunlight - that is, the active, creative, digitally-empowered citizens who power our modern social movements. The recent record on Bond and progressive politics hasn’t been, to put it mildly, encouraging. The pious environmentalist in Quantum of Solace, Craig’s second Bond movie, turns out to be - who’d have guessed? - a water-hoarding global blackmailer.
We don’t need yet another Bond movie reviving his relationship with Pussy Galore. But I’d like to see one that sits him down in a conversation with Pussy Riot.
“You are a kite, dancing in a hurricane, Mr. Bond”, says one of the Spectre operatives in a recent trailer. But I’d like to think that “hurricane” might as well be the demands of educated, creative, connected individuals, questioning the behaviour of traditional power-elites, in country after country. As much as it might be nehru-suited megalomaniacs, fingers hovering over their big red “destroy" buttons.
I’m guessing the actor Daniel Craig would relish the chance to publicly deconstruct the Bond persona this way. But in reality, mid-speech, I’d predict a sudden poison dart to the neck of Pussy Riot’s Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, eyes disappearing into her head as the gunfight starts.
Because the franchise - whether that be an outmoded model of how a state exercises power and influence in the modern world, or the Bond movies themselves - must keep rolling.
So was the Tory majority procured through Project Fear II? Just a few bleary hours after the result, that would seem to be the case.
The first Project Fear was the winning strategy in the independence referendum for the No side—a well-drilled, cross-party orchestration between the press and the Coalition government, to blare the klaxons about the systemic instability that a Yes vote would bring.
With a cruel irony, the Conservatives have applied the same scaremongering strategy to their erstwhile No-voting partners in Better Together, the Labour Party—all those primal screens showing Miliband popping out of the pocket, or dancing to the strings, of either Salmond or Sturgeon.
What partly explains the frankly stunning discrepancy between the polling organisations predicting a dead heat, and the final result delivering a slender Tory majority, isn’t just the shy rUK voter, but the tactical rUK voter—previously a Scottish phenomenon (well, they’ve moved on to a different reality altogether.)
And those tactical votes were surely partly driven from a drumbeat of “chaos” and “instability”—and perhaps also combined with a genuine ideological disagreement, among middle-Englanders, with the left-of-centre policy amalgam that a Labour-SNP arrangement would represent.
Is there a genuine note of disappointment from Sturgeon and her team that the SNP isn’t now able to contribute to a majority swirl of progressive forces in Westminster? I think so.
That’s partly because Sturgeon knows this truth: that the gradual build of confidence-and-competence in Scottish government among Scots would have been the most solid route to a robust majority in a second independence referendum. (That positive spirit is what’s powered the Yes voters to keep their movement going, by means of the SNP—or the “YeSNP,” as I call them now).
Independence would have happened best under conditions of optimism, progress and uplift; now it’ll be a harder, grittier route, grimly fighting the sturm-und-drang of a regnant Tory party. But that’s the path that lies before Sturgeon and the SNP—and you might imagine the deep strategising that’s going on in their Edinburgh New Town bunkers right now.
What impact will these 56 SNP members have in Westminster, now that the progressive majority can’t be assembled? Of course they will be automatically enrolled into committees, get their chance at PMQs, benefit from massively increased supports funds—which will doubtless assist with the much needed policy formation for a better, more worldly independence offer.
And we might see a neat turn in the “legitimacy” meme, which is that the scale of the SNP win compels Cameron to make an offer on enhanced devolution much closer to what is now a massive consensus of Scottish opinion.
The Prime Minister’s opening One-Nation speeches throughout Friday would seem to suggest they’ll make some commensurate response. Though there’s weasel-wording in his idea of Scotland as “the most powerful devolved parliament in the world”—which could be far from a coherent federal solution that separates powers, institutes electoral reform, defines the purpose (and location) of a new second chamber, and a’ that.
And the Tories, being the Tories, still have the opportunity to blow it. They could impose some kind of non-gradual, brutal fiscal autonomy that effectively (and ostentatiously) reduces the overall Scots budget, placating the resentments of middle-English voters they so effectively stoked up during the General Election.
So as the Scots Bloc shakes its fist at a spectacle of continued Tory austerity, a renewed Trident (by both Conservative and Labour parties), the miserable shitstorm of European referendum debate, its other hand will be arranging pieces on a chess board, trying to line up a checkmate for the Union.
No Indyref 2 on the SNP manifesto for the 2016 Holyrood elections, I would predict: wrath must be nursed, over a few useful years, to keep it warm. But it’s now very, very likely for the 2020 Scottish Parliament manifestos (and I mean plural—the Greens, and perhaps some new post-Scottish-Labour left grouping, may join the Nats in so proposing).
This will be a bumpier, grumpier road than the Abraham-Maslow-like flourishing towards full self-government that the “progressive” scenario promised. But the last stop of independence is now not so far off as it felt on September 19th, 2014. And it is as hard and clear as a spring day in Govan, Gordon or Greenock.
Quite a palaver to do, but I participated in Newsnight's massively expensive (and at times, screamingly camp) exercise in indy referendum politics in September. I was one of the top-table speakers at the event, in front of an audience who would vote on matters at the end of the evening. Talking with the punters before and after was by far the best bit - and as if to prove the Yes campaign's main theory about victory, all that blethering seemed to propel us to a notable victory for Yes, 62% to 38%.
The full debate is below, but if you just want to see - nay, revel - in the declaration of the vote result itself, the BBC has provided a handy page.
ABOUT THIS SITE
THOUGHTLAND is a blog of ideas, from a left-green perspective, supporting the campaign for Scottish nation-state independence - and once achieved, the full development and progress of Scotland itself. Author: Pat Kane.
WHO MAKES UP THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF SCOTLAND? A list of ideas-generators - writers, academics, blogs, think-tanks, magazines - which keep the debate about the Scottish future informed and progressing.
Any suggestions? Mail me at the 'Contact Pat Kane' link above