Transition?

bankstwoA truly great interview by Stuart Kelly in the Guardian with Iain Banks (it’s personal, clever, and insightful).

Here’s the ‘political’ bit, but it’s really worth reading the whole thing beautiful humanist thing ‘Iain Banks, the Final Interview.’

I think there will be a political rebalancing and we’ll stop swinging round to the right. In the unlikely event that I’m around for the referendum on Scottish independence I’m definitely voting ‘yes’. I was saying last year that if we don’t get it in 2014 we’ll get it in my lifetime and now it turns out my lifetime might not extend as far as the first referendum and that just seems wrong – a Scotland still shackled to a rightwing England, especially with the rise of the bizarrely named Ukip (I think they’ll find their acronym should be EIP actually) – I won’t be sorry to be missing that. I won’t miss waiting for the next financial disaster because we haven’t dealt with the underlying causes of the last one. Nor will I be disappointed not to experience the results of the proto-fascism that’s rearing its grisly head right now. It’s the utter idiocy, the sheer wrong-headedness of the response that beggars belief. I mean, your society’s broken, so who should we blame? Should we blame the rich, powerful people who caused it? No let’s blame the people with no power and no money and these immigrants who don’t even have the vote, yeah it must be their fucking fault. So I might escape having to witness even greater catastrophe.

Comments (0)

Join the Discussion

Your email address will not be published.

  1. Damn, the man just goes to show how much we will miss him!

  2. G. P. Walrus says:

    If only it was idiocy that was the problem. Unfortunately, the rich powerful people who caused the financial disaster make sure that politicians are well-rewarded for failing to act. These MPs will never see “bite the hand that feeds you” as the right answer. Blaming people who don’t / can’t vote is the smart solution for them. But it is deeply, morally wrong.
    That’s why we need independence while we still have a Holyrood system that can be made immune to this level of corruption.

  3. Paul Cochrane says:

    Great interview with worthy thoughts.

Help keep our journalism independent

We don’t take any advertising, we don’t hide behind a pay wall and we don’t keep harassing you for crowd-funding. We’re entirely dependent on our readers to support us.

Subscribe to regular bella in your inbox

Don’t miss a single article. Enter your email address on our subscribe page by clicking the button below. It is completely free and you can easily unsubscribe at any time.