Is Egypt doomed
to be the
lost revolution?
World Press Digest
New Zealand’s recovery
It used to be a cult.
But now it’s a full-
blown religion
The Cafe 2
Colin Stewart and
John Cameron
David Torrance
Alex Cox in his reply to my article ‘In defence of the union’ (31 March) complains that English newspapers ‘are riddled with the most appalling clichés, broad sweep prejudice and offhand dismissal’, yet in the course of his entertaining polemic commits exactly the same offences in relation to Scotland and the Scottish Conservative Party.
Firstly, he caricatures the latter as believing in nothing more than ‘the market’. The last time I checked, ‘the market’ existed as much in Scotland as it does in the rest of the UK, while contrary to the rhetoric of the SNP, Labour and Liberal Democrats, every mainstream party in Scotland (with the honourable exception of the Greens) has bought into the neoliberal orthodoxy of Thatcherism. The Scottish Tories, in common with everyone else, believe in a mixed economy.
Cox is, however, correct in recalling that the Conservatives urged ‘no for a better bill’ at the 1979 referendum, and an undoubtedly shoddy position that was too. But surely, more than three decades later, we ought to move on from this very typically Scottish blame-game? Devolution did not fail in 1979 because of duplicitous Tories or the SNP voting to bring down Callaghan’s government, it failed because Labour MPs implemented the notorious ‘40% rule’ and, dare I say it, the Scots electorate was less than enthusiastic.
Cox also caricatures the content of English newspapers (while conveniently ignoring the fact that the Scottish Daily Mail is Scotland’s third largest-selling newspaper). As a working journalist I, too, regularly scan the content of these dailies and simply don’t recognise the picture he paints. Sure, the English Mail caricatures the Barnett formula and aspects of Scottish culture, but then the reverse is also true. If I were an English reader of Scottish newspapers in the 1980s and ’90s (and to a lesser extent at present), I’d have grown weary of hearing that Scots were more egalitar-ian/fair-minded/social-ist/intelligent than their feeble English cousins.
Tellingly, Cox offers us no concrete examples, nor any instances of the Scottish Conservative Party ‘patronising’ the Scots electorate. A proclivity for caricature does not engender constructive political discourse. After more than 30 years, it’s that – more than anything else – which gets wearying.
Bob Smith’s comment on the announcement of major cuts in arts funding south of the border
How we should
remember the great
Neil MacCormick
Thom Cross
Neil MacCormick, 1941-2009
Scotland ought to be more than a virtual nation with a popular cultural consciousness. Scotland is a subsidiary nation within the UK state. It is currently engaged in the process of incremental devolution which ought to lead inevitably to greater sovereign authority.
Scotland ought to have sufficient cultural confidence, to express national consciousness that includes the need for a nation state. Scotland is a neo-nation with national civic institutions, national cultural characteristics and intellectual sensibilities (ways of feeling) that are and can be shared.
Scotland ought to have self-determination as a fundamental principle of natural justice and as a common good. Scotland is intellectually sovereign, yet politically subservient. This contradiction inhibits, represses and indeed prevents an empowering collective sense of national consciousness that should be able to translate into liberal nationalism.
It is this journey from national consciousness to a progressive liberal nationalism that is the task of this generation.
The ‘ought’ and ‘is’ dichotomy, dialectal in essence, is used and profoundly explained in the first two pages of ‘Questioning Sovereignty’ by the wonderfully erudite Scot, Sir Neil MacCormick, whose passing we should remember today, the second anniversary of his death.
Born in Glasgow on 27 May 1941, Professor MacCormick had a quite remarkable academic career in legal philosophy with over 30 years of academic leadership to the law faculty at Edinburgh University and indeed at universities around the world.
He argues with enormous skill the case for the development of a liberal nationalism – ‘the just state’. This draws a very sharp line in the sand from the chauvinistic, cultural and ethnic nationalism seen elsewhere.
But he did more. He engaged his immense intellect actively in studying, campaigning for and demanding self-determination for Scotland. As an MEP from 1999 to 2004 he became increasingly involved with European policy particularly with respect to the growing demand for autonomy from latent nations within larger states. (He also looked after Scotland’s whisky, ferries and fisheries while starring as a piper.)
His work on re-defining and re-formating the concept of national sovereignty is vitally important (see the essay ‘A Kind of Nationalism’ in his book). He argues with enormous skill the case for the development of a liberal nationalism – ‘the just state’. This draws a very sharp line in the sand from the chauvinistic, cultural and ethnic nationalism seen elsewhere.
He also worked assiduously in redefining sovereignty within the wider pan-European political commonwealth in which sovereignty might be expressed within political arrangements beyond the boundaries of the traditional nation-state. His defining nationalist principle is ‘the members of a nation are as such in principle entitled to effective organs of political self-government within the world order of sovereign or post-sovereign states’.
He was profoundly influenced by Yael Tamir whose book ‘Liberal Nationalism’ impressed him greatly. In particular a politics of national belonging, comprising societies of individuals with a shared consciousness, which Tamir calls ‘contextual individuals’.
MacCormick should be remembered again on his birthday (27 May) and his work celebrated by being made known. But a greater tribute to the great man would see a devolved assembly in Edinburgh after 5 May with a mandate to hasten the process towards a liberal national sovereignty.
Kirkcaldy-born Thom Cross is a former head of the Jamaica School of Drama at the Edna Manley Centre in Kingston and has worked in the Caribbean for over 30 years.
