Kenneth Roy

Megrahi,
anger,
and me

Gerry Hassan
The seven wonders of Scotland

Ronnie Smith

The first minister would
be well advised to
restrict his TV exposure

Life of George
I'll leave the funeral first

Elizabeth Goodwin

Should we cut aid to
countries where gay
people are abused?

John Cameron
The bail out

Robin Downie

Harvesting our organs:
the ethical perils of
'presumed consent'

The Cafe
Those implants

Andrew Hook

I thought I was
covered. The gas man
thought otherwise

Friends of SR
We need your help

Tom Hubbard

When I taught at Edinburgh College of Art just over a decade ago, I had to pass through the architecture department in order to reach my classroom. One of the student displays in this corridor was a proposal to situate the new Scottish Parliament in a ship, which would dock at ports around Scotland. I could picture it: MSPs calling in at Kirkcaldy, Dundee, Aberdeen, Wick, Oban and so on. Our legislators would be engaged in earnest dialogue with the Aberdonians in the sunlit splendour of Union Terrace Gardens.
     Dream on, Hubbard. The central belt would always hold sway in our politics and in our culture. Hark at Hugh MacDiarmid’s Drunk Man as he contemplates the Thistle: 'And Edinburgh and Glasgow / Are like ploomen in a pub. / They want to hear o naething / But their ain foul hubbub...' Yet another poet, the Irishman Patrick Kavanagh, made a distinction between provincialism and parochialism: provincialism was based on an abject assumption that the metropolis always knew best and that your own locality was inferior. Up here we'd call that the Scottish cringe.
     On the other hand, parochialism was a matter of healthy pride in your locality – you championed the best in the culture of your own airt. In the local is the universal. So: we needed less provincialism and more parochialism.
     Rather than parochialism, I’d opt for the term regionalism. Regionalism animated much of the thought and practice of the Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes, especially in his proposals to revive Dunfermline, to provide it with an open university (in places an open-air university), as worthy of the former capital of a nation of north-eastern Europe.
     Two years ago, Duncan Glen and I co-edited a Fife anthology, called 'Fringe of Gold'. It contains, as well as poetry and literary prose, extracts from political memoirs, architectural description, local history, local legends. A regional anthology, then, which might serve as a model for other regional anthologies across Scotland. Such a range of books could potentially transform our knowledge of the constituent parts of our country. You can tell by now that I'm a regionalist evangelist and will probably end up as a regionalist bore.
     A regional perspective can help us challenge – for example – the central belt's mean-spirited contempt for the Scots language. Bring Aiberdeen and 'twal mile roun' into the picture – and for that matter Dundee and twal mile roun – and you have Doric as well as other east-coast registers that are both spoken and written.
     Scots-writing poets such as Sydney Goodsir Smith, Tom Scott, Alastair Mackie, T S Law, need to be discovered by new generations of readers. Instead they are being airbrushed out of the cultural memory. The alternative is what passes for our brave new Scotland: a culture dominated by happy-clappy PR, the academic-bureaucratic complex, the sweetie-wifes of both sexes and of all ages.

Official deceptions

Walter Humes

Heather Brooke

One of the publishing successes of 2010 is a book by an investigative journalist, Heather Brooke, entitled 'The Silent State'. It has a provocative sub-title: 'Secrets, surveillance and the myth of British democracy'. Although Brooke is now based in London, she was originally from the United States and this perhaps gives her a useful ‘outside’ perspective on British political life.
     She sees many contradictions in the claims that are made about the 'democratic' character of our public institutions. She first draws attention to the massive amount of information that the state holds about citizens, listing the many national databases that have been established. Some of these are undoubtedly useful and justifiable but the effectiveness of others is questionable and, in some cases, they have been set up without proper public scrutiny.
     Brooke has particular concerns about the gathering of information about children and young people, some of which she suggests is contrary to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. But once databases have been established, those who maintain them have a vested interest in ensuring their continuing existence, even if it cannot be shown that they lead to improved services.
     At the same time the state claims that ordinary citizens are now much more able to hold public bodies to account for the services they provide, citing the introduction of legislation on freedom of information. In the run-up to the establishment of the Scottish Parliament, for example, it was frequently asserted that the new body would be more accessible, open and responsive to the public than the old Scottish Office had been. Such good intentions are undermined, suggests Brooke, by the widespread use of public relations to manage perceptions and distort reality: 'Public relations is at best promotion or the manipulation of facts; at worst it is evasion and downright deception'.
     Lazy journalists take official press releases at face value instead of doing their homework and checking on the claims that are made about policies and achievements. Employees who take their public responsibilities seriously and try to give honest information are liable to find themselves in trouble. Brooke gives examples of police officers and others who have been disciplined and sidelined for giving out information before it has been subject to the laundering process of the PR department.
     She also cites disturbing cases of individuals who have refused to be fobbed off by local authorities or other public bodies when they have sought to have complaints addressed. In one case a woman who kept pressing about the police and council's failure to take any action about an act of vandalism which she had witnessed and reported was told that she would have a 'warning marker' placed against her name for a period of 18 months and that this information would be passed to other agencies. Despite all the political rhetoric about community involvement and public responsibility, anyone who expects there to be an effective official response when they contact the relevant authority may well be disappointed.

One of the main ways in which public access to information is obstructed is the use of anonymity.

     Another of Brooke’s examples of the anti-democratic nature of major institutions relates to the experience of Andy Wightman, author of an important book on Scottish land ownership, 'Who Owns Scotland', first published in 1996. He wanted to update the book and produce a digitised version on the internet, providing a map which would show land boundaries.
     He had to obtain permission from Ordnance Survey (OS) which has a virtual monopoly of UK geographic data. OS is regarded as a national body existing for the public good, but since 1999 it has operated as 'a trading fund – a New Labour creation whereby a public body pretends it is a private company'. Soon Wightman found himself in a series of Kafkaesque exchanges about licences, fees and copyright infringements. To add insult to injury, Brooke reports that since 2007 OS has spent more than £40,000 paying a lobbying company in an effort to stop the public from being able to access mapping data freely.
     One of the main ways in which public access to information is obstructed is the use of anonymity. Call centre employees are instructed to give only their first name and even official letters quite often provide no clue as to the designation of the writer: an illegible scrawl at the bottom is not uncommon. Some local authority websites are very unhelpful when it comes to listing staff and their areas of responsibility. Brooke contrasts this with her experience in Seattle, where she grew up. There it is possible for citizens to go online and find the name, telephone number and e-mail address of every employee. Maintaining anonymity, she argues, is an abuse of power and an affront to democracy. Public officials should be accountable to the citizens who pay their salaries through taxation.
     The analysis that the book offers is very relevant to the experience of the Scottish Review is its various encounters with government departments, health boards, housing associations and other bodies. Their disinclination to release information, their preference for taking important decisions behind closed doors, and their cynical use of PR spin is entirely consistent with the techniques reported by Brooke. Government has massive powers of 'narrative privilege' – that is, the ability to write official versions of decision-making processes which then become the 'received wisdom'. The fact that the 'received wisdom' may bear little relation to reality is not something that seems to bother many politicians and bureaucrats.
     Brooke ends her book with a call to arms by every citizen. She urges all of us to 'ask questions, seek facts, challenge authority and don't accept silence for an answer'. Are the people of Scotland prepared to take up the challenge, or are the habits of deference to bureaucratic power so ingrained that we will continue to talk about our democratic traditions while subverting them through apathy?'

Prior to his retirement Walter Humes held professorships at the universities of Aberdeen, Strathclyde and West of Scotland. He is now a visiting professor of education at the University of Stirling.