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Putting an end to myths: Holyrood’s origins explained
Jamie Maxwell assures you that for what it lacks in economic framing, this book sets the record straight
THE late Alasdair Gray is widely believed to be the author of the unofficial slogan of Scottish nationalism: “Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.” In fact, the line was paraphrased from the Canadian poet Dennis Lee, who wrote in his 1972 poem Civil Elegies: “And best of all is finding a place to be / in the early days of a better civilization.” To be fair, Gray never tried to disguise where the expression had come from. “I have always attributed it to [Lee],” he once remarked. “But people started quoting it as if I had invented it.”
In The Literary Politics Of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation, Scott Hames — a lecturer in English Studies at Stirling University — examines how Scottish cultural luminaries like Gray have shaped our national political discourse, both consciously and unconsciously, over some 60 years.
Central to Hames’s thesis is a demystifying attack on the official, idealised narrative of Scotland’s “journey” towards Home Rule. The creation of Holyrood in 1999 wasn’t just an organic, grassroots response to Thatcherism aimed at reviving Scotland’s lost democratic structures, he argues. It was the product of a much grubbier process of institutional horsetrading, whereby British politicians — mostly associated with the Labour
Party — “managed” demands for Scottish autonomy in order to shore up the UK constitution and ward off a growing electoral threat from the SNP.
Hames builds his argument around two distinct but routinely conflated concepts: “The Dream” and “The Grind”. The former, he says, represents the commonly accepted biography of Scottish self-government: “A story of cultural vanguardism in which writers and artists play the starring role in the recuperation of [Scottish] national identity, cultural confidence, and democratic agency.”
The Grind is much more prosaic. It explains “the longer, thinner history of devolution as a shrewd saga of electoral expediency” and legislative manoeuvring, starting with Harold Wilson’s 1969 Royal Commission on the Constitution and ending with the 1998 Scotland Act.
Hames charts the interplay between Scottish literary culture and the national movement in the last century, from Hugh MacDiarmid’s “neurotic self-construction” in the 1930s and 1940s through to James Kelman’s experiments with “authentic” Scottish vernacular in the 1980s and 1990s.
The key moment of convergence occurred at the height of Thatcher’s reign, he argues, when Scots voted consistently against the Tories but remained powerless to block her sweeping social and economic reforms. In the absence of effective political leadership, the responsibility for articulating a distinctive democratic landscape, liberated from Conservative rule at Westminster, fell to writers and artists like Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney, and Liz Lochhead, all of whom were influential supporters of devolution in 1997.
Hames thinks this is how and why The Dream took root and The Grind — the thankless procedural slog that ultimately made Holyrood possible — drifted from public view.
Indeed, the idea that constitutional change was driven exclusively by cultural factors, and not by the less glamorous reality of Westminster machine politics, became the core foundational myth of devolution — a myth that is quite literally embedded in the north-facing wall of the Edinburgh parliament building, in the form of 26 decorative panels bearing quotes from Burns, Scott, MacDiarmid, Gray, and other Scottish literary greats.
Intriguingly, according to Hames, this myth was cultivated by a small group of left-nationalist thinkers centred around Radical Scotland magazine in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Through their writing and activism, journalists and academics like Chris Harvie and James Robertson sought to promote the belief that Scottish culture was inherently anti-Conservative, with the aim of permanently dislocating Scottish opinion from the Anglo-British right.
Their efforts paid off. The Radical Scotland strategy was “highly effective in prying Scottish politics away from Westminster and [constructing] a political space in which Tories would have no choice but to concede devolution or be seen to ‘repress’ Scottishness,” Hames writes. “This went as far as openly “othering” Toryism as incompatible with the authentic desire for self-determination.”
By the end of the 1980s, the
“language of class politics” had elided with a more traditional, nationalist emphasis on cultural differentiation and the image of a supposedly
“proletarianised Scotland … dispossessed by Thatcherism” now central to the Home Rule cause.
This book does two things extremely well. It demonstrates how close the relationship between Scottish nationalism and literary culture has been since at least 1979. Writing shortly before the 2014 referendum, the novelist Alan Warner even suggested a No vote would signal “the death knell for the whole Scottish literature
‘project’ — a crushing denial of an identity writers have been meticulously accumulating” for decades.
And, against the romanticising tendencies of the Scottish left, it convincingly argues Holyrood is in many respects a deeply conservative institution, built to regulate Scotland’s democratic instincts rather than unleash them. “It was the densely networked and overlapping professional circles of ‘Civic Scotland’ who were directly empowered by devolution,” Hames concludes.
Those circles might be good at “extracting political rent” from the parliament’s “collective symbolic capital”, but they’ve never run it radically or imaginatively.
On the downside, Hames’ analysis is
The creation of Holyrood wasn’t just an organic, grassroots response to Thatcherism
frustratingly incomplete. He doesn’t offer a detailed picture of society beyond Scotland’s political classes or cultural elite, nor place devolution in a clear economic context.
The combined influence of the trade union movement, the voluntary sector, the Church of Scotland and wider Scottish public opinion itself in sustaining calls for a Scottish parliament over three decades, in the face of prolonged Westminster neglect, is thus largely overlooked.
Moreover, the strategic debates that took place during the 1980s over how best to achieve Home Rule are almost completely divorced from the dramatic economic trends — rising unemployment, rampant inflation, and rapid deindustrialisation — that characterised the decade and, arguably, made such debates necessary in the first place. This feels like a serious omission, not least because Literary Politics is billed as a major new critical account of Scotland’s devolutionary history.
Hames also overstates his otherwise persuasive critique of the post-1997 “Scottish consensus”. He’s right to say Scotland’s current political leadership has “successfully turned a rhetoric of mongrel resistance to [British] non-democracy” into a “corporatist governing ethic” at Holyrood, based on vacuous “Team Scotland” sloganeering. But that slightly misses the point.
A standoff between Nicola Sturgeon and Boris Johnson is brewing and another independence referendum is on the way. Politically speaking, Scotland is more unsettled today than it was before Holyrood was established: devolution undermined the long-term stability of the British state.
But none of that should detract too much from what Hames – a Canadian – has achieved. The Literary Politics Of Scottish Devolution is one of the most original and arresting studies of our political culture for 10 years.
It is a powerful deconstruction of the political myths that made modern Scotland and a compelling reassessment of Holyrood’s institutional origins.
Hames challenges the mainstream chronology of Home Rule just as the Edinburgh parliament enters its third decade. The book is disillusioning, but in a good way. No doubt Alasdair Gray would have approved.
The Literary Politics Of Scottish Devolution: Voice, Class, Nation, by Scott Hames, Edinburgh University Press, £24.99