Christopher Harvie

What did you find most encouraging?
The awareness that the future of the human race is at risk, also known as the fear of death. In the latest seconds of the human story the generation of carbon has chalked 'Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting' before populist dictator and dire tabloid alike. The imminence of peak oil might be helpful, killing the motor-car by 2030? Forget electric or hydrogen power: nothing was easier to throw together than the old Ford gas-guzzler; making mankind regress to the dominion of the 'man on horseback'. Now we must curb mobility, be collective, or perish. Are we in Scotland fortunate in experiencing the revenge of the natural world in advance, with changing weather patterns which no longer seem random? Can we tolerate any longer the vested interests preaching complacency or social atomism?

What did you find most discouraging?
The impact of the information revolution: the tsunami of fact and sensation released on us. This threatens both to destroy our understanding, normally based on practical grasp of a limited amount of information, and experience gained in handling it. Faced with the revolution, the response has been to retreat into the familial or the tribal, if not into semi-autism: witness the conceptual incoherence and semi-literacy of many in a generation which ought to be unprecedentedly well-informed, in a nation which pioneered the systematised organisation of knowledge in the 18th century. Rational social cohesion in Scotland, and innovation towards this end, is more retarded than elsewhere in Western Europe. Can we turn things round?

Which public figure did you most admire?
A couple of rather unlikely ones, notionally opposed because members of different political parties: Stewart Stevenson MSP and Lord Adonis, currently Scottish and UK transport ministers. I have campaigned for a rational transport policy since my teens, essentially trying to regain the situation we had before the 1960s, where mobility meant personal effort (walking, cycling), bus and rail. Most efforts failed on encountering munchkin ministers, bending to commercial pressure-groups. Now, despite the size and lack of scruple of the road-and-car lobby, ministers appreciate the advantage of safe, speedy, low-carbon transportation, in which one can work, leaving guidance and security to the system. The Victorians had this, along with public control and magnificence: unusual in contemporary Ukania. Adapting to this technology, and retraining for it, remains difficult.

Which public figure did you least admire?
Tony Blair. George Bush only intermittently made sense; Blair was fit to plead. Elected on a landslide to combat civic sleaze and catastrophic deindustrialisation, he presented instead the 'regular guy' of the breakfast TV couch, believing that charm and 'dynamism' could hypnotise, with the same opportunism as his maker, Rupert Murdoch. This goal wasn't delusive: he believed that, by bringing Britain and much of Europe into the Iraq war on the USA's side, he could make London home to the global 'malefactors of great wealth'.
     An address by Blair at Tübingen in 2000 was simply embarrassing, though I managed to meet the 93-year-old Marion Dönhoff, whose 'first life' ended in 1944 when nearly all her friends were killed for plotting against Hitler. Her post-war response was to found Die Zeit, the liberal-intellectual flagship of Germany's decent media. Blair ran no such risks, but ended by degrading party and parliament.