Labour’s Change of Mind
As everyone is watching the slow-motion car crash that is Reform UK’s Holyrood campaign, the other parties all launched today. We’ll be looking at everyone’s manifestos and doing interviews in the coming days and weeks.
Launching in Glasgow, Labour’s leader Anas Sarwar was at pains to make clear that he would make no deals with the beleaguered Lord Offord and his depleted candidates. “No coalitions, no deals, no stitch-ups – we are not going to touch Reform,” he said.
But it was only a few weeks ago that Sarwar himself was making the case for working with Farage’s party. Alistair Grant, writing in The Scotsman wrote: “Anas Sarwar has left the door open to working with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on individual issues if it wins MSPs at the next Holyrood election.”
“The Scottish Labour leader said he would not turn his back on a good idea from any opposition MSP, regardless of party.”
“He refused to be drawn on whether he would be happy to use Reform votes in the Scottish Parliament to get into power. Polling suggests Mr Farage’s party could win a raft of MSPs at the Holyrood election next year, which could put them in the position of kingmakers.”
Grant also noted that Richard Tice, Reform UK’s deputy leader, previously said the party would back Mr Sarwar to become first minister at the expense of the SNP.
As recently as January the Daily Record’s Political Editor was exploring how ‘How Anas Sarwar could end up as First Minister with fewer than 35 Scottish Labour MSPs’. It’s archived here.
Despondent he starts by admitting that: “olling strongly suggests the Holyrood election may already be over and the result set in stone. The SNP are on track for a fifth term in office and cruising to a comfortable victory over their rivals.”
But he explains: “There is one alternative outcome which, while currently unlikely given the polling, is spoken about privately by Labour, the Lib Dems, the Tories and Reform. Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar used to believe the magic number for victory in May was securing 48 MSPs – over double their 2021 tally.”
“After the Starmer Government’s troubles hit the Scottish party’s poll rating, Labour insiders privately downgraded the number to 38. One Labour MP told the Record there is a “path” to power for Sarwar even if his party ends up in the early thirties. How could we end up with a minority Labour Government if they only have 32 MSPs?”
“If Labour, the Lib Dems, Tories and Reform reach 65, insiders say the pro-UK parties would vote for Sarwar as First Minister, despite Swinney leading the largest group.”
“The Lib Dems and the Tories would not blink at ending nearly two decades of SNP rule in these circumstances and so Reform would play kingmaker.”
It was a cunning ruse, but today it’s been abandoned.
Downwind of Offord’s shambolic campaign, Reform have become too toxic for Labour. But let’s not pretend that desperate politicians and their client media wouldn’t be attracted to do deals in the future.
Since the SNP insist that this election is about Independence it makes sense for all the Unionist parties to unite briefly to prevent another SNP administration even if they can agree on nothing else. The SNP and Greens would then have to decide whether to play a blocking role or cooperate in areas of substantial agreement.
On current polling it is unlikely to be a real scenario.
Current polling shows a massive pro-indy majority Ian so that even if Labour were to decide to make a pact with what is effectively a fascist party, and the Liberals and the Tories, it would make no difference whatsoever.
Yes, exactly. There’s unlikely to be any Unionist majority by the looks of things. No way for Anas Sarwar to be First Minister. More worrying for Labour is the polls putting them around 14% and that means they might come 3rd (some polls suggest even 4th). So having spent more on this election campaign than ever before, so I believe, and having been bailed out by the party in England, what will happen post-election? The architects of Labour’s disastrous campaign are top of the Lists and so will be among the even smaller pool of Labour MSPs rerurned to Holyrood. Talk about rewarding failure. Labour’s unionist obsession has cost them dear.
Well, I dont know about you, Mike, but I am thoroughly fed up of wee free / RC paternalism – take your pick – and the deeply reactionary decision of our politicians- including N Sturgeon – to reject assisted dying in Scotland…
The moralizing, petty, do-gooding small town mentality of Scotland reveals itself yet again to be the reason why as a country we are stuck in the past and are at the wrong end of so many league tables in Europe…
Today, the brave Noelia will die in Spain, a young paraplegic woman, just 25 years old, who has fought her family through all the courts right up to the European level, to assert her right to die…
Abandoned as a child, sexually abused on three occasions, she threw herself off the fifth floor of a building in 2021. She lives in constant pain…
She has been at the centre of a media storm the last few days in Spain.
But Spain has an assisted dying law which leaves the choice in Noelia’s hands…
Scotland, as always, is run by a bunch of self-important, small town imbeciles who think they know more than the rest of us…
Will it ever change?
I agree with you Douglas, I was in favour of the legislation
The blight of our country, along with the tradition of moral philosophy, is the legacy of the kirk, though the catholics in public life in Scotland are just as bad, like good old uncle Kev McKenna, as they wring their hands in anguish at other people’s decisions about their own lives…
Noelia’s decision to take her own life to avoid constant pain has led to a huge smeatr campaign by the Far Right in Spain, Vox, but at least half the Scottish Parliament are on the same wavelength when it comes to these issues…
Great, I was not too keen on the legislation and your daft attack on the rest of us did nothing to remove my doubts. I wouldn’t want your finger on the trigger tbh.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, my finger on the trigger, that’s what it’s all about, naturally…
The SP has twice rejected assisted dying, people are free to rot to death at an early age in the worst housing in Europe, in the most neglected and abandoned areas of the country, the attainment gap, a chasm, can continue to grow every year, but god forbid our politicians pass up the chance to feel smug and self-important about assisted dying…
What is the poiint of the Scottish Parliament? Seriously…
“I couldnt in all consciousness..”
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve all got our fingers on the trigger, that’s where it’s at…
Well, Noelia has now died, assisted by health professionals in Barcelona…her agony is over…
The editorial in El Pais newspaper reads “Noelia’s Dignified Death”…
So, Scotland is to the right of El Pais…well to the right…
A bunch of nightmare kaikyardists and wee freerers, and then the novel and the cinema have always been weak in Scotland, well, naturally, the mentality just makes you want to pack.up and leave…
But then again, I already did…
As for Sturgeon, she is basically on the right these days, what with rowing back on Trans rights and voting against assisted dying…
And the expression should be “in all conscientioussness” not “all consciousness” , but given our politicians have gone through the half baked Scottish education system, a factory line of mediocrity, no one even notices….
Questions, questions: is there such a thing as a Scottish public intellectual these days, Neal Ascherson apart? Neal, after all, is in his nineties…
And is there a political party of the Left we could call.progressive unambiguously?
I don’t think there is…
Things can only change if we make them change.
We are talking about a country where all music, except psalm singing, was banned in the church for centuries… Where the theatre was banned!!!
So, it follows that the suspicious and zealous religious mind can only ever see the downside, or in fact some nefarious plot, in these issues…
Self ID wasn’t actually about making life easier for the few hundred trans people in Scotland, it was a nefarious plot to allow men access to public lavatories where they can prey on women…
Assisted dying isn’t there to make death easier for the relatively few people living in chronic pain, it’s actually just a ruse to.bump off little old ladies and the disabled…
Always an ulterior motive with the religious mind….nothing is as it seems, and all those things that could go wrong…
The zealots and fanatics still run Scotland…
I reject your invocation of Calvinist predestination.
I attended Sunday school and bible class at Duddingston Kirk every Sunday until I was 14. I was even a sixer in the Presbyterian paramilitary Life Boys! None of that prevented me from developing a critical perspective on Scottish society and sunnier outlook on life. In fact, the experience probably helped.
I didn’t mention predestination, but in any case, just imagine if instead of spending your Sundays at Duddie kirk being religiously brainwashed, you’d gone to art class to learn how to paint, ot music class, or a botany course to discover all the names of the plants and trees in Scotland, or drama workshops, a hundred different activities which, time and again we know, absolutely transform people’s lives…
Art was effectively banned in Scotland from the Reformation of 1560 right up to the second half of the 18th century, two centuries, a ban eventually lifted thanks in no small part to radical aetheists, or skeptics as they were called then, like David Hume…
That Burns managed to write, collect and adapt so many wonderful songs and poems in such a ferociously intolerant culture is nothing short of a miracle…
Anyway, the Scottish Taliban are alive and well to this day…
Something of an exaggeration. While the unco’ guid may have tried to ban fun they only had limited influence. While Baillies might have banned public entertainments the gentry and aristocrats who actually ran the country were not passively giving in to such attitudes and found ways around them. After all the notorious “Beggar’s Benison” flourished in late-18th century Fife and Edinburgh. Parish elders were at constant war with incontinent youths, like Burns, because the illegitimate children could become a cost on the Poor Rate. Popular music flourished in pubs and clachans, and gentrified by Niel Gow for drawing rooms too. Pious Presbyterians like James Hogg’s mother also preserved the oral traditions ( she berated Scott for writing them down).
Accounts of the Court masques of James VI make one understand why more modest people disapproved. Queen Ann would not have been out of place on the Graham Norton show. Local magistrates everywhere were suspicious of theatre and popular musical performances mainly for public morals and order reasons, much as they are still dubious about fairs.
There was a period from 1688 to the mid-1700s when Calvinism did rule the roost but before that Scotland was officially Episcopalian, though hardly less strict. Music never entirely died out in Churches and by the later 18th century even the Church of Scotland was employing music masters from the Anglican tradition. Moody and Sankey in 1875 were something of a breakthrough with their Evangelical revival. People liked rousing choruses.
Theatre in Scotland was well established by 1800 having existed for some time by work arounds. The Edinburgh Assembly Rooms held regular balls from the same period and weren’t the first dance halls. St Cecilia’s Hall had been home to the Edinburgh Musical Society even earlier. The audience may have tended towards Episcopalian but there were plenty of Presbyterians there too. An equestrian circus in Broughton Street went through various hands eventually becoming a variety theatre in more modern times.
The arts and religion are hardly enemies. The Classical music repertoire would be a lot thinner without religious music from J S Bach down to Scotland’s own James Macmillan today. Writers, poets and playwrights may belong to any religious tradtion. Painting and sculpture has had some of its greatest expression on religious themes. I love good modern stained glass hardly found outside churches.
I wish more people were open to expressing themselves through art, but today I don’t think it is religious belief that holds them back, too often it is an inherited belief that it is not for them or their social class. That is as hard to break as our addiction to lifestyles that make us the sick man of Europe. All our arts companies strive so hard with outreach ( see the SCO Queens Hall performance tonight) but it struggles to reach public consciousness.
PS. I’m an atheist.
But you seem to suggest that people in Scotland are predestined by their Presbyterian conditioning. I don’t believe that.
And I don’t think it’s either or. My evangelical grandma introduced me to the theatre by taking me to a production of Antigone at the old Royal High School. In the 1950s and ’60s the Church of Scotland nurtured Scottish drama at the Gateway Theatre. I learned to draw and paint at school, and loved the weekly art appreciation classes. I took a Botany degree at Aberdeen University.
You’re obsessing about Presbyterianism, G, my point is that it makes little difference whether Catholics or Protestants opine in public life in Scotland, they are both very conservative… Forbes or Cherry, who cares?
They hold far more away in Scotland than they ought to in matters such as assisted dying or trans rights, both of which are policies approved in parliaments all across western Europe…
As for culture, we have a much lower per capita spend than other European countries, and a world famous art school.lying in a heap of rubble. And Scottish men continue to die much younger than anywhere else in Europe…. All of this after 20 years of the SNP…
As for Scottish Presbyterianism, I can’t think of any other European country which banned art for two centuries, though the Taliban did so… And of course that has had a long term effect on the relative paucity of Scottish culture and the indifference of govern!ent to it…
It is a particularly narrow religion, subject to.numerous schisms and factions, as can only be the case with narrow minded people…
Max Weber believed the absurd peculiarities of it led to capitalism…
Thanks Ian Tully, and yeah, my understanding was that the elites of course banned things which they themselves indulged in, as is the case today in the world of radical Islam.
I wasn’t trying to say art and faith are necessarily at loggerheads either, indeed clearly in many cases, like Bach, they go together.
But these bellweather issues like self ID – and the riduculous storm it created – and assisted dying point to Scotland’s politicians being on the same side as the right and the far right in the rest of Europe today. They manner they rejected assisted dying the other day was galling, like they were the saviours of the nation. As for Sturgeon, I’m genuinely surprised she has voted against it.
Why on earth didn’t they call a referendum on assisted dying? What is the problem?
As for the Church of Scotland and the Roman Catholic Church, both are profoundly reactionary institutions with a list of crimes against humanity as long as your arm. Don’t expect them or their followers to reflect on centuries of colonialism, racism and repression… They just carry on as before…
Its complex. I mean the failure of assisted dying might have been about a loss of belief in the state/authorities to act in good faith. This was a parliament that was prevented from even creating a national recycling scheme. So some of it is the c and C conservatism you identify, some of it is the failure of the parliament to work towards a common cause and create public support, and some of it is the deliberate scuppering of the British State.
I supported the Bill too but it is simplistic to say that rejection was down to religion. Several MSPs who supported the first reading were unconvinced by the end. Some of the strongest opponents were disabled people who see in assisted dying shades of Nazi euthenasia.
There are genuine concerns about how assisted dying shows “mission creep” in those countries that have it, most recently in Canada. Failures in end of life care, inadequate support for assisted living, and sometimes just plain poverty have led people to give up. The dangers of making assisted dying easier for those with mental health problems are obvious. Many saved from suicide attempts are profoundly grateful ( not all).
Everyone agrees end of life care needs serious improvement yet the hospices still only exist due to charities. My brother was grateful to Marie Curie.
I distrust referenda they are inherently populist and a favourite of dictators. Our MSPs listened to the evidence from all sides over a considerable time which is why we delegate the responsibility to them. Perhaps on issues like this we could have a large randomly chosen citizen jury dedicated to the task, as they recently tried in Ireland, but asking the electorate at large with only a passing knowledge and no serious study of the issue to take the decision brings up.all the usual issues of who controls the media including, increasingly, the online sources.
Hi Bella
Sorry, I don’t think I can reply to you above on the thread…
Just look at Trump and the white christian nationalism which has been unleashed on the Middle East…
That people like Forbes and Cherry, or McKenna and MacWhirter, are still calling the shots just makes one despair…
Is there maybe not something especially pernicios and aggressive about all of the religions which have come out of the Middle East?
Should we not be looking at reilgions of the East instead (India, China etc).
And yeah, I take your point about Holyrood being undermined by Westminster, systematically since the 19th of September 2014…
Douglas – I supported the Assisted Dying legislation and was extremely disappointed (& angry) that it didn’t pass into law.
From a review of voting figures it appears that:
Lib Dem’s & Greens MSP’s voted overwhelmingly in favour.
SNP MSP’s voted 60/40 in favour.
Tories MSP’s voted3:1 against.
Labour MSP’s voted overwhelmingly against- only 3 voted for it.
While I have no doubt you are correct that religious beliefs played a part in rejecting the bill from these fifties cannot help but think that Labour MSP’s voted against as if the legislation had passed it would have caused their colleagues at Westminster a bit of a headache?
I also think that this is one of few non constitutional issues that would be better decided by a referendum rather than parliament. This is because the legislation didn’t force anyone action on any individual but allowed each person to make a decision that only affects the individual themself.
“Labour MSP’s voted overwhelmingly against- only 3 voted for it…”
To be fair to Labour, that wasn’t because of partisan religious beliefs. It’s simply that Labour’s considered position is; “We always vote against stuff at Holyrood. Because Holyrood shouldn’t exist” .
As I keep saying, it would be prudent to be as sceptical of polling as of political parties (one could argue there is an accountability crisis across the whole political sector).
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/mar/26/yougov-withdraws-survey-church-attendance-christianity-young-people-england-wales
Ian Tully, no one has said the assisted dying bill died or failed because of religion, we are talking about a general religious tenor in Scottish society which is totally unacceptable to me at the political level, at the level of political decisions…
Self ID for trans people was never meant to be, and never was in the rest of Europe, a philisophical question about whether a man can become a woman. That was always utterly irrelevant.
It was meant to be a very practical and discreer attempt – promoted by the World Health Organization – to make life easier for a tiny group in society who have been mistreated, isolated, mocked and belittled for centuries, when not physically attacked…
Who were the people who turned that intent into a moral panic about trans people? The religious columnists of The Herald and the Scotsman plus Joanna Cherry…
They fail to realize that, while the notions of trans people might sound absurd to them, their own farcical beliefes have much less of a leg to stand on. They believe, for example, the Earth is only 5,000 years old, which is what the Bible says, when Hutton discovered it was hundreds of thousands of years old back in 1770 out on the crags of East Lothain…
It would be tiresome to list the thousands of factual errors the bible contains…
So why are these deeply irrational people and their absurd beliefs in Christianity given credence over the tiny minority of trans people in Scotland?
You would be hard pu to find any Christians who believe in Bishop Usher’s calculation of the age of the earth outside of the USA. Hugh Millar, a founding father of Geology in the early 19th century was a leading member of the Free Kirk. James Clerk Maxwell found no contradiction between his deep Christian beliefs and his pioneering work in Physics
The debate on transgender rights is complicated and far from being an outlier the recent decision by the International Olympic Committee puts the UK in the mainstream. What gave traction to the debate in Scotland in particular was male rapists claiming to be female, not the tiny number of people who are genetically not of their assigned gender, or the larger group who suffer gender dysphoria. The popularity the Lady boys shows and transvestite shows in general suggest most people are accepting of how others choose to live, but you cannot ignore that this debate has been almost entirely about men declaring they are women with only a couple of instances of women passing themselves off as men for sexual purposes catching attention. Given the adoption of male dress codes as standard across both genders a woman is hardly making much of a statement by dressing as a man. I must have missed the debate on women wishing to share men’s changing rooms. I find much of the tone of the transgender lobby aggressively male in its attempts to claim ground women fought hard for. Johanna Cherry and J K Rowling have never been anti-trans just pro-women in those very small areas where women need security. Cherry is a gay woman. We imported a US progressive (woke) language that was different from Europe’s but we are very much in the European mainstream in the legal position including childhood transition.
I don’t see some submerged Christianity in this, although there has been plenty of overt Christian and Muslim commentary most people do not take their lead from it. It has not been the churches that have taken the lead in the debate and most preach tolerance within their moral codes.
Hi Ian
I have little or no idea what Christians believe when it comes to some of the absurdities in the Bible. It is meant to be the divine word revealed to mankind – to translate it was a sin and some of its first translators into the vernacular were executed – so, by its own logic, it must all be true or none of it true. I think most Christians just ignore the bits which we know not to be true.
I find the God of the Old Testament to be a very troubling figure to found so many faiths on.
I don’t remember ever having met a trans person, all I know about them I got from the films of Pedro Almodovar back in the 80s and 90s, a few of which featured the trans model and actress Bibi Andersen (not to be confused with Bergman’s actress of the same name) who is one of a fairly long line of transsexual actresses in Spain where they seem all round to be more accepted than in Scotland, albeit there are acts of trans phobic violence too. Self ID passed in Spain like almost all of western Europe.
The self ID issue was, as I understand it, an attempt to eliminate the bureaucracy involved in changing sex, but it quickly became an excuse to bash and mock trans people and basically write them off as a bunch of fruitcakes.
What links religion and being trans? That what people believe about themselves really does matter. That is part of the absurd human condition. We cannot avoid telling stories about ourselves because we live in language.
So if someone wants to believe that Jesus came down to earth to personally save their soul from burning in hell, fine by me. But if someone feels they have been assigned the wrong sex at birth, I can’t see how that is so drastically different….
You clearly do have no understanding of what Christians believe and you have telescoped two millennia of Christianity into an eternal present. It may be ironic that Jerome’s translation into Latin to make Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek texts more accessible to Western scholars became an attempt to confine it to scholars but vernacular translations always existed within the Orthodox Communion, and everywhere after the Reformation. Several cultures owe their written languages to missionaries from the Slavic nations to most of sub-Saharan Africa.
Scholars have never thought of the Bible as an unerring simple “Word of God”, a basic reading of Kings and Chronicles would show varying views between writers. Chronicles is not keen on Kings. Traditionally it is seen as a gradual process of Man understanding God. A few extreme Evangelicals certainly take the position that it is unerring but they rarely take their studies beyond the Bible itself and seem able to reconcile internal differences to their own satisfaction. Jewish scholars have never seen the Pentateuch as a text like the Koran dictated to Mohammed. Even the Ten Commandmentsare interpreted with wisdom and subtly. Since the German scholarship of the early 19th century the Biblical text has been subjected to intense critical analysis and the pseudographical status of parts of the New Testament generally accepted within a revised understanding of what authorship meant at the time.
Leave your misunderstanding of Christianity out of your arguments which should not require an Aunt Sally.
Practicalities, as soon as someone requires others to adapt to their beliefs it matters what they believe. That applies as much to those who wish to make legal and social rules based on how they interpret their Sacred Texts as it does to those who wish people to play the Emperor’s New Clothes game and see what isn’t there. In every situation where genitalia don’t matter they should make no difference but some spaces should be single sex for basic protection and modesty. Would the female to male transgender person really feel safe in a male changing room? I wonder? There is one local trans person who looks like a 14 year old boy among the men and I just can’t see it. Some may identify as the opposite gender from early childhood but for others the uncertainty and insecurity of adolescence might not be the best time to make irrevocable decisions.
Thanks Ian, I shall be sure to use that argument the next times someone quotes the Bible at me, ie, that it is a kind of work in progress, and not infallible, which is what you’re saying if I understand you correctly…
As for trans point you make, the debate never got out of the locker room. What does self ID, a measure to cut out bureaucracy for trans people, have to do with the public lavatories of Scotland, hardly the most salubrious of places at the best of times? The locker room conundrum existed and exists with and without self ID…
Nothing in the public debate about the multiple cases of hemaphrodites in nature (snails, for example) nothing about how trans people have been viewed outwith Scotland in other cultures, nothing about Plato’s The Banquet where the issue is touched upon. It’s all just about the locker room, something which, as you rightly say, with sensible measures and gender neutral spaces could easily be solved.
My point about Calvinism and art is also, it ought to be said, hardly an original idea of my own. You’ll find MacDiarmid lamenting it, you’ll find JD Fergusson in his Manifesto On Art calling on Scottish people to wear bright colours to fight Calvinist gloom and doom, you’ll find it too in Cairns Craig on Scottish literature (which he charactrizes as based on fear more than imagination if I recall rightly)…
The Italian peasant would go to Mass and stand in a church covered in astonishing artworks and hear Mass delievered in Latin, not her language, and leave with the organ playing.
The Scottish peasant would stand in a bare and whitewashed kirk, with just a cross on the wall, and listen to ministers making finely nuanced points about the words in the Bible – the star Minister doesn’t exist in the world of catholicism as I understand it…
This week in Spain, when the effigy of the Macarena is taken out of the cathderal of Seville for Holy Week and paraded around the city, there will be rapturous applause and women weeping – at least there was the last time I witnessed it. It is massive deal in Spain to this day, and an aesthetic spectacle of some magnitude.
That aesthetics have historically been viewed with distrust in Scotland, and certainly never given the same importance as ethics, seems to me to be inarguable…
Such considerations were considered vanity by the Kirk for centuries…
Please note that Christians believe the Revelation ended with the Resurrection of Jesus. Any Christian who quotes the Old Testament at you with referencing the New Testament hasn’t properly read to the end of the book., The entire sayings of Jesus easily fit on one side of A4. The Letters are commentary much of it from a man who never met Jesus. The gap got even bigger when the disciples of the Apostles took over. The tone of the early Church Fathers is quite different.
MacDairmid was said by even his admires to be a difficult man to get along with and god at making enemies. Ferguson was a lover of the good life, rather ahead of his time in many of his behaviours. His partner Margaret Morris was an early adopter of topless bathing at Cap d’Antibes, and a follower of Isadora Duncan. None of these people had trouble expressing themselves artistically in “Calvinist” Scotland. Morisd created our first ballet company.
The Rev. Alexander Whyte, Minister at Free St Georges Edinburgh, Moderator of the Kirk and Principal of New College was born illegitimate in this intolerant society. He lived Dante and taught classes in his church, corresponding with Cardinal Newman. His lectures were illustrated by Phoebe Anna Traquair an outstanding multi talented artist responsible for the murals at the Apostolic Catholic Church, Mansfield Place, Edinburgh as well as at thee aSong School of StMary”s Episcopal. She regularly travelled to Italy with his family. At the same time John Duncan was straddling Celtic Revival with Symbolism in his paintings encouraged by Patrick Geddes. He met with Rousseau and Gauguin in Paris and didn’t feel outside the mainstream. The Glasgow Boys and their succors the Scottish Colourists were doing well too. Douglas Strachan was brightening up the Presbyterian churches with glorious stained glass.
They might have been chaining the swings up on a Sunday during my childhood but art wasn’t stifled by Calvinism.
Thanks again, Ian, but I’m not sure we’re talking about exactly the same thing.
I’m not saying that Calvinism made art in Scotland impossible, there will always be individuals in any society who go against the grain as there clearly have been in some of the cases you mention, I’m saying the general contours of Scottish intellectual culture have been influenced by the legacy of Calvinism, favouring some forms of intellectual endeavour in detriment to others…
The upisde of Calvinism is that it insisted on the individual’s personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the reading of the Bible, and for this reason, as I’m sure you know, Scotland was one of the first fully literate countries in Europe along with the Netherlands.
By contrast, the peasants of southern Europe were illiterate right up to the middle of the 20th century and for them, the image, the effigy, the spectacle of Mass, almost WAS their religion… the aesthetic was everything… though obviously by the 20th century, the hatred of the Catholic Church in South rural Spain was bitter and intense and saw the emergence of the biggest anarchist movement in Europe (and there is something about the anarchists which is kind of like our covenanters, the frugal, spartan lifestyle, the absolutely fanatical hatred of hierarchies etc)
It comes as no surprise, maybe that the two great figures of the Scottish Enlightenment were two philosophers, David Hume and Adam Smith, while the great figure of the Spanish Enlightenment was the painter Goya y Lucientes, maybe the first painter who THOUGHT in paint…
In any case, that Calvinism had a huge and terribly deletirious effect on the arts in Scotland for the first 150 years (from 1560 to 1710, and some years beyond) can hardly be disputed. After all, numerous artworks were physically destroyed on the grounds of idolatory…
The Catholic Church, of course, had long since published the Index of Prohibitted Books…
There are other factors of course, like the court of James VI leaving Edinburgh for London in 1603 and with it, royal patronage…
Anyway, for whatever the reason, we are significantly behind our European neighbours in terms of arts funding and infrastructure today, and indeed the prestige the arts are seen to hold in society…
We don’t have a state of the art modern art gallery to showcase the nation’s modern art for example…
They have built about 6 or 7 such museums in the last couple of decades in Spain: the Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Catalan Centre for Contemmporary Arts in Barcelona, the IVAM in Valencia… they’re ten a penny in Spain!
Last summer I caught the exhibition of the Scottish Colourists. I was shocked to read that it was the very first time the Scottish Colourists had been brought together under one roof for an exhibition in Scotland…
That is totally unbelievable… but if you don’t have a state of the art modern gallery, maybe it’s not so surprising…
On the question of assisted dying, this is yet another policy area where it would be a lot more straightforward and to the purpose if we had a political constitution based on a common ‘good life’ philosophy, which of course would include the idea of a good death.
Something that Solon the Lawgiver addressed in his unflattering response to fabulously superrich Croesus King of Lydia on whose was the happiest life, according to Herodotus. We might not be impressed by the militarism and patriarchal aspects of his choices, but there’s the trinity of Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose, the importance of family, the leaving of grandchildren, and giving your mum a lift to the festival.
But until we address the lack of a ‘good life’ philosophy (that is, how to be good, live well as a polity on our living planet, not to have goods) in Scottish political debates, these problems will be talked around in circles.