A Question of Confidence

The actor Brian Cox created a plume of ‘outrage’ from Unionist quarters for comments he made during a live discussion with the First Minister at the Edinburgh Book Festival. The actor was discussing his conversion from being a Labour party supporter to a supporter of independence. He said:

“I did the voice of Labour for 1997, and I was very passionate about socialism – I am a socialist, essentially, I’m a socialist. So I was really, really pleased to be part of that and we got the biggest majority ever. And then systematically we blew it. Big time. Then, finally, Iraq was the thing that really did me in, and Tony Blair’s hubris over Iraq I just thought was awful. And I felt that the country, the million-man march, it was kind of ignored, and I just thought ‘there’s something amiss’.

 

The issue of ‘conditioning’ is an interesting one.

I think it’s more of a surround-sound than a directive. The abuse casually and routinely handed-out to Lennie Pennie, Iona Fyfe, Emma Grae (author of The Tongue She Speaks) and many others for the temerity to speak in Scots, points not to lack of cultural self-confidence, it points to cultural self-loathing.

Here was a comment the Herald newspaper published under Lennie Pennie’s recent article ‘Thanks to the Scots language, we are raising a post-cringe generation’.

The examples are so common and ubiquitous its difficult to keep up.

Here’s Labour lawyer Ian Smart calling author Emma Grae a ‘white nationalist’ because she speaks and writes in Scots:

 

Here’s the cringingly repetitive argument about Scots published in a  national newspaper:

Scots is patently not a language. But we all know why the SNP is determined that it should masquerade as one. My column in today’s Mail. pic.twitter.com/V5tUBW8Rwy

— Jonathan Brocklebank (@BrokerJonathan) August 26, 2022

 

Here’s Jenny Colgan writing drivel about Gaelic in the Guardian: “After years of trying to master the language of my Scottish forefathers, the unpronounceable vocabulary may have finally defeated me…”

Does any of this speak of cultural confidence? Does this resonate of a country at ease with itself?

When we started publishing in Scots and Gaelic a few years back we noticed that every single time we published we would have to moderate a ton of hostile abusive messages. ‘Scots is not a language’ – ‘This is slang’ – ‘Nobody speaks this any more’ (to people clearly speaking and writing in their own tongue). It was endless. Something about people simply writing in Scots or Gaelic makes other people deeply uneasy. Why is this? It was explicitly not particularly political (Tom Harris famously nearly had a nervous breakdown at the fact The Tiger Who Came to Tea was being translated into Scots).

Scots language suffers from a quixotic double-attack. From one perspective it is derided as being ‘common’ / not really a language / slovenly / slang. There is a strong class element to this aversion which is closely allied to both social aspiration (shedding yourself of such crudity so as to assimilate more easily further up the social ladder), and to cleaving as closely as possible to the dominant cultural force (Anglo-British). Confusingly there is also a critique of Scots as being “middle class”. It’s an affectation and a concern of either a peripheral rural Scotland (ie not proper urban Scotland) or a marginal cultural obsession.

The hostility to gaelic has a different dimension. It is simultaneously less and considerably more threatening to monolinguists and cultural unionists. There is also an expressly religious (ie anti-Catholic) element to this. See for example the comments below the line in the Herald here.

So the hostility is a swirling mass of class and religious prejudice, with a good dose of misogyny thrown in – in the case of Lennie Pennie, Iona Fyfe, Emma Grae and others.

They threaten the mostly white, male audience at some visceral level.

Back in 2013 Murdo Macdonald wrote on ‘Finding Scottish Art’ for Bella. He said:

“In 2010 I presented a paper to the Rannsachadh na Gàidhlig conference at the University of Aberdeen entitled ‘Reflections on the Neglect of the Visual Art of the Scottish Gàidhealtachd.’ In that paper I noted the curious neglect of the visual aspect of a Highland culture that had produced both world class illuminated manuscripts in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries and the founder figure of modern Scottish painting in the nineteenth century. At the heart of my concern was, and is, the necessity of re-appropriating such lost histories. Such concern has informed my research not just with respect to Highland art but with respect to Scottish art in general. There should be no need for such re-appropriation, yet even after the publication of Duncan Macmillan’s comprehensive book on Scottish painting in 1990, it was easy to find yourself in one of those strange conversations in which your interlocutor was earnestly trying to persuade you that in fact the area you were studying did not exist. Typically people would tell me that Scotland was a literary nation and that the visual tradition, was, almost as a consequence of this, of no account. Since many of my interlocutors were themselves Scots, or others sympathetic to Scottish culture, this struck me as an intriguingly auto-destructive attitude.  But what underlay it was, of course, ignorance. A refusal to believe that any significant cultural tradition existed, if they themselves had little knowledge of it. ”

None of this reflects a country at ease with itself, it reflects a country in which anglo-normative values prevail and in which routine abuse against Scots and Gaelic speakers is everyday.

When the Proclaimers released This is the Story in 1987 there was uproar. While the album was hugely popular the response from some quarters was ridicule and shame. The duo had the temerity to sing in their own accents. We’ve moved on since then, but the attitudes remain.

When James Kelman won the Booker Prize in 1994 for his novel How Late It Is, How Late – the Oxford educated judging panellist Simon Jenkins, described Kelman himself as ‘an illiterate savage’, suggesting his inability, and ineligibility, to write.

When he took to the stage to accept his award Kelman stated: ‘my culture and my language have the right to exist and no one has the authority to dismiss that… A fine line can exist between elitism and racism. On matters concerning language and culture, the distance can sometimes cease to exist altogether.’

Many Scots who voted No have cultural confidence and base their views on their political or economic judgement. I’m fine with that, I acknowledge it and recognise it despite thinking they are entirely wrong. But many don’t. Many have been brought up to believe that their own culture is inferior, or simply doesn’t exist at all. This is a simple fact played out every day by people who feel threatened by songs or books or road signs, by a young woman tweeting a ‘word of the day’ or by publishers translating books into Scots.

There is nothing explicitly nationalist nor political about using your own language. The terrified people who have politicised this are the monoglots, the unionists and those who can’t accept cultural diversity.