The Devolution Dead End?
In 2004, Edwin Morgan wrote that Scots wanted their new parliament at the foot of Edinbrugh’s Royal Mile “to be filled with thinking persons as open and adventurous as its architecture.” What Scots did not want of their parliament, however, was a “nest of fearties.” Ultimately, continued Morgan, “the droopy mantra of ‘it wizny me’ is what they do not want.”
Today, ‘it wizny me’ appears baked into Holyrood’s vocabulary. The Scottish Parliament presides over a litany of botched infrastructure projects, bungled schemes and broken promises. Alistair Grey’s plea to ‘work as if in the early days of a better nation’ has fallen on deaf ears as politicians accept, rather than push the boundaries of, Scotland’s current constitutional settlement.
Jenny Morrison and Andy Wightman join Coll McCail to discuss this rut and whether Scotland can escape it.
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Interesting. A few things seem to be missing:
The SNP can be accused of committing treason against a future Independent Scotland in a way not mirrored in its Unionist opponents; but their royalist alternate form of treason is habitually not interrogated.
Scotland has been used by UK government as a testbed before devolution without consent (Thatcher’s Poll Tax), but devolution is useful to Westminster for similar reasons, *if* Scottish guinea pigs are culturally similar enough to English ones to make tests valid.
There have been projected imaginations of Independent Scotlands: in science fiction. This is the really significant genre too often overlooked (how has the BBC managed to avoid showing a near-future independent Scotland? We can guess why, royal charter and treason felony etc).
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Picking up on Jenny Morrison’s point, if Scotland has been a detectably more misogynistic culture even than England up to 1970s at least, what’s the point in celebrating such culture? Who create and disseminate our stereotypes more than artists?
For all the interesting downwards focus on local government by Andy Wightman, the question of internationalising government only comes in late in the podcast, and only in the context of multinational conference failures. But there are huge possibilities for global cooperation while rejecting corporate outsourcing and bypassing national governments that even a devolved Scottish Parliament could engage with (if we can avoid the ‘fact-finding’ ministerial junket routes).
People who want a radical constitution for an Independent Scotland are likely to be uninterested in fixing devolution; indeed they may have an interest in holding all its flaws up as educational material on a maldeveloped political system that must be rejected. Predicting that political parties will be a major locus of corruption, favours and dysfunction is as easy as falling off a log, if you’ve studied politics as I or the podcast participants have. It was disappointing to hear the comparison that Wightman makes between Westminister and Holyrood committees, though. I agree that the British Empire is not a modern state.