Kenneth Roy

The road to Matfen

The Scottish playwright C P (Cecil) Taylor worked from his garden hut in the village of Matfen, just over the border. There he wrote perhaps his finest play, 'Bread and Butter', a tender evocation of Glasgow working-class life. As George Bruce observed in the little magazine I then edited: 'It is rare that theatre brings us so close to the inward lives of people.'
     Yet C P Taylor chose not to live in Glasgow. He chose not to live in Scotland at all.
     I asked him why.
     'Because,' he replied, 'you can breathe more easily down here.'
     At the time – this is a very long time ago – I only dimly understood what he meant; later I came to understand very well. He found the smallness of Scottish society suffocating. He preferred to write witty, splenetic letters to friends, mostly attacking the complacency and self-regard of the people who ran the arts in Scotland, from a place geographically close to Scotland, yet spiritually distant.
     Many others, including some of the best among us, have chosen the same path to exile – not taking the road to Matfen, which required a leap of the imagination, but the more obvious high road to London. Some of my acquaintances, people in journalism and the arts, have been so completely absorbed into London society that they are now more metropolitan in their manners and ways of life than its natural inhabitants.

Among those who choose to stay, there remains a problem about breathing easily. The establishment of Scotland in its many branches – political, cultural, academic, ecclesiastical, legal, administrative – is no larger than it was when Cecil Taylor was alive. Being so small, its networks and guilds inevitably mingle and coalesce, formally and informally. As I discovered when I was founding the Institute of Contemporary Scotland, it is extremely difficult to bring together a group of influential people who do not attend the same parties, send their children to the same schools, join the same committees and enjoy the same patronage. It has taken me 10 years to reach Matfen. Even now it is only as a metaphor.
     In so small an establishment as Scotland's, with the same people bumping into each other and to varying degrees dependent upon each other, there is an inevitable reluctance to rock boats, an unwillingness to stick heads above the parapet. There is a tendency towards consensus. If you operate within a consensus, your breathing becomes easier at once.
     Examples of this tendency are everywhere. Only one member of the council of the Law Society of Scotland (Walter Semple) has spoken out against the sell-out of the Scottish legal profession, choosing this magazine to do so. (He will have more to say on the subject in tomorrow's edition.) Others who share his concerns have remained silent; there has been a closing of ranks. No one should be surprised. In Scotland, there is too much to lose by candour.
     Likewise, I questioned earlier this year why so many voluntary organisations are subdued in their public utterances about the poverty being experienced by the people they seek to help, and suggested that they had been compromised by the financial support they receive from the state. I have no doubt that, privately, civil servants and politicians would agree that it is possible to silence potential critics by buying them off. But of course it is bad form to acknowledge this openly, particularly in a country of so many inter-linked privileges and interests. Needless to say, there was a strenuous denial of my suggestion in a television discussion.
     In the Scottish media, too, there is an almost hilarious tendency to consensus. I should know; I have been part of it. In his book 'Paper Tigers: the Scottish Press and National Identity' (Polygon, 1994), Maurice Smith examined the hostile media reaction to the unexpected Conservative victory of 1992, which appeared to represent a serious setback for the devolution cause. As it happened, this assumption proved to be mistaken; seven years later, there was a parliament in Edinburgh. But we were not to know in April 1992 that young Mr Blair lay in wait to charm us all. Maurice Smith wrote: 'The tone was set with two pages of post-election commentary [in Scotland on Sunday], three days after the poll. Joyce McMillan despaired of the continuing bitter rivalry between Scotland's defeated opposition parties...below her column James Naughtie predicted, safely, that the Scottish question is "certainly here to stay, whatever the rest of the UK thinks". Next door, Kenneth Roy declared that he was close to despair'.
     I read this passage of Mr Smith's book with amused embarrassment. It had not occurred to me on the Sunday in question that there must be intelligent voices which dissented from this self-pitying consensus, that these dissenting voices were worthy of attention and respect even if the star columnists and a majority of the readers disagreed with them, and that the paper was wrong not to give them space.

What was true then is truer now. The coming of the parliament, and in particular of the SNP administration two and a half years ago, should have created a more inclusive Scotland, one confident enough to be unafraid of dissenting voices; indeed that is the Scotland we were pretty well promised by the new kids on the block. Yet the same old suspicions and hang-ups prevail.
      Tom Gallagher, a distinguished historian and peace studies teacher who lives in Edinburgh, has produced a book about Scotland under the SNP. Broadly sympathetic to nationalist aspiration, Professor Gallagher is critical of the present leadership, partly for what he sees as Alex Salmond's authoritarian style and his stifling of alternative views, partly for his reliance on emotional sentiment inspired by history. While contentious, these points of view are scarcely heretical; any confident, inclusive society should be able to accommodate them and discuss them fairly; indeed they have been given some potency by the ruling party's poor showing in the Glasgow by-election. Yet, in so far as the book has been noticed at all, the tone of most of the coverage has been far from reasonable. Professor Gallagher has been called mad.
     It is not necessary to agree with everything – or indeed anything – in this book (or in the two articles we are publishing by its author this week) to object to the personal mauling he has received. The book has not dissuaded me from my view that the justice secretary is a courageous and enlightened politician, not only for releasing the so-called 'Lockerbie bomber' on compassionate grounds, but for his attempts to introduce a new penal policy, tackling a Scottish disgrace ignored until he confronted it. I have a friendlier opinion of Kenny MacAskill, of Nicola Sturgeon, who has shown admirable composure in her handling of public hysteria over swine flu, and of other ministers in the Scottish government, including Mr Salmond himself, than Professor Gallagher does.
     But our disagreement on these matters does not lead me to conclude that he is mad. We breathe no more easily as a nation by ridiculing an intelligent dissenting voice as 'the nutty professor', and then allowing the insult to be repeated and take hold. This is not the sign of a confident, inclusive society. It is the sign of an extremely insecure one.

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