Closing down the debate

Tom Gallagher

Photograph by Islay McLeod

It is easy to get carried away by the cornucopia of debate at the MacGill Summer School in Ireland discussed recently in SR. Disclosure and love of argument are not the norm in all corners of Irish life. Important sections of the media became cheer-leaders for the financial adventurism that laid Ireland low.
     For a time, features editors gave the prime spot to hired hands from the world of banks and stock-broking who insisted that Ireland could keep defying the laws of economic gravity. Many academics suppressed their own qualms and refused to publicly declare that the boom was based on crackpot economics. Too many Irish universities are dominated by apparatchiks for whom market-driven philosophy is the only kind that matters. Tom Garvin, a political scientist, denounced them in the Irish Times two years ago when he wrote: 'A grey philistinism has established itself in our universities, under leaders who imagine that books are obsolete, and presumably possess none themselves'.
     Nevertheless, books have poured off the presses in Ireland beaming a light on the shady dealings and acts of pure criminality which have led to the sack of its economy. The journalist David McWilliams – the best-known sceptic of the Celtic Tiger era – earlier this summer put on a one-man show at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin where large audiences paid to see a political cabaret in which he exposed the elite’s misdeeds, dividing Ireland into a land of greedy ‘insiders’ and helpless ‘outsiders’.
     Each Sunday morning, RTE, the state radio, has several hours of debate in which elite figures and their detractors have a talk-fest about the state of the nation. An elder statesman like Garret FitzGerald and an influential politician on the sidelines like Pat Cox both see themselves as having a public duty to stir things up. Can we imagine the late Willie Ross or George Younger wanting such a role for themselves? Significantly, both of these Irishmen are ex-journalists by profession but looking around the Scottish media scene one sees a profession heavily infiltrated by the PR industry.
     It is perhaps far overdue, but the Irish are ready now to journey to dark areas of their past and confront wrenching episodes like the abuse and ill-treatment of children by men and women of the cloth to whom much of independent Ireland’s social welfare system, and part of its education system, were entrusted.
    

 

     By contrast, the social pathologies of contemporary Scotland have rarely made it to the centre of national debate. Issues such as the runaway crime rate and high levels of interpersonal violence, the persistence of pseudo-religious sectarianism, and the tragedy of many thousands of children reared in an environment of frequent drug use, are seen as esoteric by many of those who regularly discourse in the conventional media. Academics, think-tankers, and bloggers seem completely hooked by the voodoo of constitutional change. Just like the Victorian arbiters of opinion who were absorbed with theological disputes, they seem content to accept the disturbing social conditions around them. But visitors perhaps will know that something is amiss in Caledonia if they see that the most popular reading material on sale at airport bookshops in Scotland is devoted to criminal godfathers and the deeds of their henchmen.
     The Irish gave up long ago searching for an external alibi for their problems. Indeed, I was surprised at the willingness to point to Britain as a centre of good practice. Nobody disapproved at MacGill when an ex-civil-servant noted that the Guardian had been complaining about the domination of Oxbridge graduates in the cabinet. 'If only we had such a problem,' he remarked, complaining about the number of former teachers who packed the Dail for each of the parties.
     The yoke of continued Westminster overlordship and an economic policy attuned to the needs of the City of London remain causes for complaint in Scotland. A Scottish acquaintance based in Dublin believes these days that the Irish go in for too much self-flagellation. Even the people are not spared the lash. Garret FitzGerald and others spoke out about the readiness of many ordinary citizens to turn a blind eye to trafficking of influence and favouritism because some of the worst offenders were personable types from fairly modest backgrounds rather than lofty patricians.
     In Scotland 'the people' remain inviolate. Nobody has asked why the voters of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath needed to give Gordon Brown one of the biggest majorities in Britain. Whatever his undoubted merits, his stern image and bouts of foul-temper made him thoroughly disliked across the border, but not apparently here. He laid down party dogma on economics for 15 years and anyone in the Labour Party who dared offer a fresh perspective was soon the target of his wrath.
     Gordon Brown has a career path not unlike FitzGerald’s. Before moving into politics, they were journalists and researchers. But it is impossible to imagine Gordon proudly proclaiming as Garret did last month that ‘I stir things up. That’s my job’. He is an intellectual who prefers those around him to accept his line as the only true orthodoxy. There are not a few such figures who hold sway in Scottish academia, including the social sciences, and woe betide any student if the wrong book is quoted in an essay on the constitutional question.

 

     Many Scots learn at an early age that it is dangerous to speak out of turn and much better to assemble behind established positions. Scotland still shrinks from creating public spaces which esteem communication and debate about politics and government. Scotland’s establishment has broadened in line with political, social and cultural changes. But the state, semi-state and professional networks comprising it have remained secretive and unenthusiastic about subjecting their activities to much scrutiny. This controlling spirit is not the monopoly of one side of politics. Several of those from a radical left background who have entered the corridors of power in growing numbers show the heresy-hunting tendency that used to be the preserve of the masons, church elders and business figures who pulled the strings on the conservative wing of Scottish political life for generations.
     Opportunities for debate are closed down. No summer schools; no high octane debate on the state of the nation displacing the babble and tunes that pour out of BBC Radio Scotland; no figures like Garvin or McWilliams given a platform for their unorthodox views. A ‘Festival of Politics’ is organised by the convener of the Scottish parliament each August. I don’t know what it was like under George Reid but under Alex Fergusson, it is a stale event that is a byword for caution and predictability. It usually features B grade politicians from yesteryear disinterred from the elephant’s graveyard. The star turns this year are John Prescott and Malcolm Rifkind. A concession to radicalism has been made by extending a cameo role to the singer and campaigner, Annie Lennox; it is an example of the kind of compromise that is normal now in Scottish political circles with left, right and nationalists too agreeing on the need to stay firmly in their comfort zones.
     Six months ago, as the author of a book on Scottish nationalism , I approached the civil servant organising the event to see if there was room for a talk on the extent to which Alex Salmond’s party was really a force for change in Scotland. I got an intriguing response:
     ‘ The Festival of Politics sets out to bring forward events that consider a wide range of social and political issues, and that engage the public in an innovative way...care is always taken to ensure that events have an overall political balance. It would therefore be highly unlikely that the Scottish Parliamentary Corporate Body (SPCB) would approve festival events that were based around a hypothesis that might be pursued as partisan or critical of an individual political party, a policy intrinsically associated with a political party, or an individual politician’.
     So the answer was an emphatic no and no it remained even when I got the agreement of an SNP MSP that he would be willing to debate the performance of nationalism in power since 2007, to ensure balance. Running simultaneously is the Edinburgh Book Festival; despite being a recipient of many thousands of pounds of taxpayers' money, it also shrinks from a frank examination of the contemporary condition of Scotland, the tiny number of events with Scottish political or historical themes recycling a range of figures who are often fixtures from past years.
     Perhaps nobody could have imagined that the cultural atmosphere of a superficially left-leaning country finally with its own parliament, would resemble in several uncanny ways that of Northern Ireland in the bad old times of the Unionist-controlled Stormont. Perhaps some of us should have seen it coming. Chares McKean, knowledgeable about the interface of the media and the arts in Edinburgh, wrote in the 1990s: We are a small country run largely by unelected and unaccountable people, based on a system of mutual favours’.
That’s how Stormont was.

 

     Far too much power is concentrated in Edinburgh which has always been a city of autocratic insiders who monopolise power at the expense of the rest. But I wonder what would be the effect if Glasgow counted for more? Today, its largest party shows signs of falling under the control of those in the entertainment industry who cater for the weaknesses of many ordinary Glaswegians. The former editor of the city’s newspaper, the Herald, confessed a preference for moving among the titans of Glasgow’s post-industrial leisure-based economy in order to do his job. The editor of this publication begged to differ, writing that an editor should be far removed from influential coteries if he or she wished to preserve the independence necessary for covering stories concerning elite figures. The desire for powerful people to operate in clandestine ways prompted another observation from Kenneth Roy:
     ‘All this points to the essential timidity of Scottish society, a small society in which the same people bump into each other at the same social functions, the same conferences, the same Holyrood consultative gatherings, all extremely cosy and knowing, all with a vested interest in very little being known about themselves’.
     It is striking that even as Scotland has moved from an era of narrow privilege to one of greater democracy and the pendulum has swung from the political right towards the left, the Scottish elite remains so hermetically-sealed. The media appears the main culprit, having abdicated its investigative role, except where gory crimes are concerned. But the performance of universities and NGOs is also often an inglorious one. Is independence likely to produce even more nasty surprises than devolution has done if this establishment continues to take steps to ensure that questioning members of society find out as little as possible about their affairs? The answer may well be yes. To me at any rate, it begs the question – is independence really worth it if the main beneficiaries will be the power groups who have managed to flourish in most political seasons?

 

Tom Gallagher is professor of peace studies at Bradford University. His book 'The Illusion of Freedom: Scotland Under Nationalism', was published last autumn.