The accidental Man - and Traveller

The books about Scotland’s political future did not engage me - too dry and technical. I need more poetry! The 2-year timetable for the referendum discussion certainly gives the chance to concentrate the mind - although few seem to have risen to the occasion (save the sole (disciplined) blogger and websites I've mentioned). 
I turned instead to a novel from one of the several amazing contemporary Scottish writers - James Robertson and, specifically, his seminal And the Land Lay Still ( "a portrait of modern Scotland" the blurb says). In the last 12 months I've done a series of posts on Germany, Romanian culture and Bulgarian painting. Perhaps the next series should be on Scottish writers?  Andrew O'Hagen's essays would be a good start.
Before that, I was distracted, on my return to Bucharest, by material on Naples (where I hope to go soon); by Joseph Roth's riveting A Life in Letters - principally from France and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s - by a travelogue; and by a biography. A year ago, when browsing in the Koln bookshops, I came across a marvellous remaindered book about him with amazing photographs from that era.....Excess baggage costs deterred me from the purchase - as it was I paid an excess 50 euros to KLM!!! I regret the opportunity!!!!

The travelogue is Nick Hunt’s Walking the Woods and the Water – a retracing in 2011 of Patrick Leigh Fermour’s steps from Hook of Holland to Constantinople taken in 1933 and enshrined in a trilogy which started in the 1970s and finished only a year after his death in 2011. Leigh-Fermour (“Paddy” as he is known amongst cognoscenti) was one of a trio of English travel-writers who inspired a generation of travel writers – the other two being Norman Lewis and Eric Newby.

One article which listed a few of the greats suggested that travel writing is a neglected genre. It is actually one of my favourite genres – being about the serendipidy of encounters, landscape and social history. An annotated list of 86 travel books doesn’t include what for me is one of the best – Gerald Brennan’s South of Granada (nor Robert Louis Stevenson’s jaunts)

Leigh-Fermour's biography came out just a year after his death. If ever someone typified the eccentric English traveller it was Paddy L-F. The various reviews are all worth reading – but I start with one of the most immediately informative -

In 1933 ‘a rather noisy boy’ with near-empty pockets and a head full of poetry set out from the Hook of Holland to walk to Constantinople. Paddy Leigh-Fermor was eighteen years old, fizzing with romance, curiosity and animal high spirits – eager, as his biographer explains, to step away from a fractured childhood, a chequered school career, and a remote suggestion from his even remoter father that he should try chartered accountancy if the army didn’t appeal.As he tramped across the Low Countries and down through Germany to Bratislava, two letters of introduction hoisted Paddy out of the hedgerows and into a half-forgotten world of castles and old libraries. Margraves and counts cheerfully passed him along, with hunts, and gallops, and long nights talking by the fire, and friendships forged, in the Ruritanian twilight. 

That world was swept apart by the war, and it would be forty four years before Paddy related the first part of his journey in "A Time of Gifts", followed seven years later by "Between the Woods and the Water". Artemis Cooper reveals (in the biography) what Paddy left out, changed, or never quite wrote – including his tumultuous love affair with a beautiful Romanian countess, and the final leg of the journey, which took him beyond Constantinople to Greece, the country that was to shape his life. He was in Moldavia, and in love, when war broke out. Too wild and singularly gifted for a regular commission, he fetched up in occupied Crete, where in 1944 he carried out the daring kidnap of a German general, an exploit unpicked in one chapter of this biography; the story entered popular legend through the book Ill Met by Moonlight, written by his companion-in-arms Billy Moss; in the film Paddy was played by Dirk Bogarde. 

Paddy’s own rich and energetic writing was an extension of the life, of a man who seized the world around him and shook it till it rattled. What dropped down in late nights and laughter, liquor and lovers, were the gems and diadems of his life and prose.He had eight languages and friends in all of them, from Cretan shepherds to waitresses, Vlachs to Duchesses, gypsies and kuss-die-hand German aristocrats. Some friends were lovers: horrid old Somerset Maugham, brooding on some perceived slight, defined Paddy as a middle class gigolo to upper class women, a mean twist on Paddy’s cheerfully seductive generosity. ‘Most men are just take, take, take – but with Paddy it’s give, give, give,’ said Ricki Houston.They could be generous in return – above all Joan Rayner, his lover and amanuensis, whom he married in 1968 (‘I don’t believe in long engagements’, he remarked; they’d been on and off since the War). Maurice Cardiff was astonished when Joan dropped money on the table at a Nicosia café, ‘enough if you want to find a girl.’ 

The books came slowly, growing through layers and revisions inspired, perhaps, by a 3000-word magazine commission: Paddy drove editors crazy. In The Traveller’s Tree, P L-F anatomised the islands of the Caribbean; A Time to Keep Silence explored the monastic world, through which he often derived peace and solace; but it was with Mani and Roumeli, in a projected series that would cover the whole of Greece, that his intense and multi-layered fusions of style and passions emerged at their fullest extent.The style – turreted like Guelf fortifications, bristling with knowledge, speculation, humour and keen observation – was the fruit of deep learning, which he wore lightly and absorbed freely, with dazzling leaps of imagination.

Until Joan and he built a house at Kardamyli, on the Mani peninsula, in 1965, his abode was never fixed for long: a succession of places lent or rented as need arose – a castle outside Rome where the rats attacked the butter, a cottage in Devon, a Greek villa, a small hotel, an Irish house, palaces and hovels in Spain, France, but of course especially Greece. For the wandering scholar Kardamyli was the answer. It contained what John Betjeman called ‘one of the rooms in the world,’ filled with books and stoked with friendships and drink, overlooking the sea. Everyone came, of course: Chelsea and Grub Street, toffs and dilettantes, drawn by Paddy’s gift for friendship and surprise; Bruce Chatwin moved in next door. Joan allowed stray cats to wander about ‘as free as air currents’: they ran their claws over the divans and Paddy found the right expression: he called them ‘born down-holsterers.’Not everyone got it: some people resented his bumptiousness and ebullience, and he could have a tin ear for the mood at times, as Cooper tells us.  But Paddy left most people feeling stronger (bar a hangover), their prose enriched, their humour and sense of wonder sharpened; and this marvellous biography, aptly named An Adventure, has the same tonic effect. Paddy’s exuberance could have overwhelmed his biographer, but whether describing a night attack on Crete, a love affair, or the political tensions over Cyprus that poisoned Anglo-Greek relations after the War, Cooper writes with a cool hand and clear head. Her book lives up to the majesty of the man who died at the age of 96.

This review of the biography gives some of the basic facts of his life and the Scotsman also has a good review but the real meat is in this one from the Times Literary Supplementary which is the only one to emphasise that "he learned, very early, that to sing successfully for his supper, not just personal charm, but having a genuine interest in the lives and activities of his hosts, were tremendously helpful”. 

What for me is most striking is how "accidental" his life was - he left Britain, penniless, on a hunch in his late teens; making fortuitous contacts in a society far richer than he could aspire to;  "swanned around" for a few years ( as "we" were allowed to in the early and mid part of the century); took the opportunity offered by the Second World War to extend his networks; and then" swanned around" some more until one of his most committed lovers gave him an annuity......The total antipathy of the career focus which was dinned into most of us in the post-war period...... 

Let the Washington Post have the last word 

When Paddy began his European rambles, he was not quite 19. Up until then he had been an indifferent student, although passionate about reading and gifted with a phenomenal memory. Paddy also possessed, along with good looks, daring and boundless curiosity and a seemingly irresistible charm. He originally expected to doss down in haystacks and barns as he trudged along; in fact, he regularly smiled his way into country houses, consulates and baronial manors — and sometimes into the beds of young women and lonely divorcees. Letters of introduction then eased his way into other homes. As he cheerfully sauntered along, he would belt out each region’s folk songs.At the end of his journey, Paddy met Princess Balasha Cantacuzene, a scion of one of the great dynasties of Moldavia and Wallachia. She was 16 years his senior, but the two fell in love and the young Englishman passed four idyllic years living on her family estate at Baleni in what was then known as Rumania. During these years he read voraciously — history, reference works, Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Gide, Proust, Tolstoy and much else. To his personal magnetism and general sexiness, the magpielike Paddy soon added a mind filled with poetry and out-of-the-way knowledge.When Britain declared war on Germany, the stylish young adventurer immediately left Baleni to enlist. He was, at this point, all of 24. But Paddy already knew much of Europe intimately, had made friends everywhere, and could speak French, German, Romanian and Greek. He was a natural for the Intelligence Corps. 

Lieutenant, later Major Leigh Fermor spent much of the war behind the lines in Crete, helping to coordinate its resistance to the Germans. Periodically, though, he would be pulled out for R&R in Cairo, where he partied all night, slept in the arms of exotic girlfriends and drank champagne with King Farouk. During one particularly orgiastic revel, the young intelligence officer came up with a plan to kidnap the commanding German general in his area of Crete. It would give a boost to the partisans’ morale.

After the war, Paddy — now all of 30 — found work at the British Institute in Athens, where his colleagues included the historian of the Crusades Steven Runciman and the translator and novelist Rex Warner. But, despite all his gifts or because of them, Paddy couldn’t hold a 9-to-5 job. He was too free-spirited, too feckless, in some ways, too spoiled. For years he would rely on, sometimes live on, the generosity of rich and aristocratic friends and lovers. And there were many. When he finally returned to England, Paddy cemented his connections with the aging members of the Brideshead Generation.

The second half of Cooper’s biography is packed with the usual names: critic Cyril Connolly, the famous beauty Diana Cooper (the biographer’s grandmother), the Duchess of Devonshire (nee Deborah Mitford), Ann Fleming (wife of Ian), poet John Betjeman and many others. With Joan Rayner, whom he had first met in Cairo, Paddy would settle into a permanent, if extremely open relationship. By the time the two finally married in 1968, they had already bought property in Kardamyli, Greece, and built their ideal house (marble, open air, lots of books, cats), where they would welcome celebrated friends, former Cretan partisans and numerous admirers of Paddy’s books. Easily distracted and as much a perfectionist as Flaubert, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor — as he eventually became — always found writing difficult. His descriptions are like tapestries, rich in color and intricate design; his bravura diction often requires a dictionary close at hand; and sometimes his weaker pages are clotted and overwrought.

Yet “A Time of Gifts” marvelously evokes an ancient Mitteleuropa now almost wholly vanished. If you’ve never read it, do; and if you have, you’ll certainly want to follow up with this fine biography of its adventurous and romantic author.

Scotland's Default Position?

The last few posts, I realise, have not actually added much to the sum of understanding on this thorny issue of Scottish “Separation” - a more honest term, for me, than “independence”. Noone aspires to dependence – but separation is a tortuous process, generally involving painful choices and difficult negotiations.

The Scottish Government of the past 6-7 years has had a very good press but is now, for me, pushing its credibility - and that of the notion of independence - to the limits.

·       The Scottish nationalists (for such they call themselves) refused to play any part in the decade-long process which led to the honouring by the Labour Government in 1997 of its promise to give the Scottish people a referendum on Scottish Devolution. They simply jumped on the bandwagon which duly delivered a resounding yes vote then - and the Scottish Parliament in 1999. And the same was true after 2007 when various commissions set up by other political parties reported on the feasibility of further powers; and Bills were debated and enacted. The nationalists sat on the sidelines.  Verily they have had it so easy!

·       In 2011 they became the majority government and were able for the first time to talk seriously about a referendum on independence – which would not then have suited them. Westminster could have been difficult (in ruling, for example, that the power to hold such a referendum fell outside the “devolved” powers) but the terms of agreement on how such a referendum would be conducted were concluded remarkably easily- in “the Edinburgh Agreement” of October 2012 giving the Scottish Parliament the power to pose a single option question in a referendum - which would be held before the end of 2014. No sweat for the nationalists.    

·       They argued in the November 2013 White Paper that little would change – neither the pound nor membership of the European Union or NATO. British Government and EC responses have suggested otherwise. While I accept there is a lot of “grandstanding” going on (particularly on EU membership), it is clear that there could be no monetary union with England. If the euro crisis has demonstrated anything, it is that that there can be no shared currency without fiscal union. The choice is then a Scottish pound (backed by a National Bank, debt recycling and currency fluctuations) or the euro.  

It was the Labour and Liberal politicians who controlled the Scottish Parliament from 1999-2007 who gave the Scottish Government its distinctive policies – eg of “social justice” and community empowerment; free residential care for the elderly (when in England they are charged 300 pounds a week); free university tuition (when in England they are charged 9,000 pounds a year); almost free drug treatment; health services remaining in the public domain while the subject of profit in England; community ownership of rural land. No sweat for the nationalists.

To be fair to the party which is called the “Scottish Nationalist” party, they have become more left-wing as the Labour Party became more right-wing. They have indeed inherited the mantle of social democracy.

That is what has changed in the past decade. The Scottish people – a social democratic nation – feel betrayed by the Labour Party; and have no confidence in the ideology it shows south of the border.  

The left-wingers in Scotland now part of the yes movement believe this is a unique opportunity to salvage the post-1945 settlement so badly savaged by Margaret Thatcher. Small Scandinavian nations have shown that this is possible – particularly if, like Norway, they have oil and have set up Oil Funds and tax regimes to ensure that the benefits flow to future generations. But oil revenue is now declining sharply…… 

Germany has shown the benefits which  federal system brings. Patently Scotland has very different traditions and culture from the rest of Britain. The majority of Scots would chose to remain in a Federal system - but have not been offered that option. There is a huge risk they will leave by default!  
The New York Review of Books had a useful article last month which summarised the mood and arguments nicely. And this neutral post from an English sociologist is a superb take on the wider British context which gives so many Scots the inclination to go it alone.

Slipping - or sleeping?

The metaphors we use in our speech betray our political anxieties. During the Cold War, the talk was of “the domino effect” as fears were stoked of country after country collapsing into communism. In the 1970s, when the idea of a Scottish Parliament was on the cards, the talk was of “the slippery slope” such a concession offered to Independence.

In the event, the domino pieces collapsed in the opposite direction – it was communism which fell.

But, thanks to the Labour Government of 1997-2010, the Parliament (and Scottish Executive) was eventually established - in 1999 after a successful referendum in 1997. Its electoral system was designed to be more consensual than the Westminster one – and coalition government (Lib-Lab) duly became the order of the day – despite the scale then of the Labour vote. A stronger Committee system was also created in Parliament to encourage a more open and inclusive system of policy-making. 

All of this has helped shape a positive view of the political process in Scotland which is in sharp contrast with the cynicism and anger one finds amongst the English public.

From 2007 a minority Nationalist government has been in power in Scotland – controlling the 60% of public spending in the country which the Scottish government controls. And in 2011 Scottish voters were duly persuaded to give the Nationalists enough seats to form a majority government. 
A year later, after an intensive process of deliberation in both parliaments a major Bill was passed (with Nationalists taking no part and abstaining in the vote). The Bill extended the powers of the Scottish government – although few voters understand that since they will not be implemented (if at all) until after the referendum of September.   

The “slippery slope” may have turned out to be remarkably free from stress or dangerous falls but is still looking dangerous. As the Notes from Britain blog put it last summer -

        What is remarkable in the present state of the independence argument is the vast extent to which those leading the Yes camp are deliberately playing down the very core idea of independence: namely, that Scotland would be going it alone, as her own new State.
In a speech in the summer, the First Minister made a very curious statement which totally played down the significance of independence – he said that Scotland is currently a member of six unions and that of these it is just the one from which he wishes a divorce. This one is the political and economic union with the rest of the United Kingdom.

         An independent Scotland “will continue to participate fully in five unions”, said Mr Salmond: (1) the European Union, (2) NATO’s defence union, (3) a currency union, (4) the Union of the Crowns, and (5) the “social union between the people of these isles” (whatever that means).

         Mr Salmond’s new-found, five-fold Unionism is highly fanciful.
·         While I have little doubt about his commitment to wishing to remain in the EU, that doesn’t make him a Unionist.
·         His NATO policy is new, hated by at least half his own party, and likely to be highly contentious within NATO given the SNP’s determination to rid Scotland of nuclear weapons.
·         His unreliable assertions on the currency union were exposed months ago as something which the rest of the UK would not be able to sign up to without imposing on Scotland the sorts of fiscal constraints that would make her more dependent on London, not more independent (the fiscal crises of southern EU states has demonstrated the design flaw at the heart of the euro).
·         His use of the seventeenth-century phrase, the Union of the Crowns, is anachronistic and inaccurate: what he proposes is that an independent Scotland would become a 17th realm within the Commonwealth (Her Majesty the Queen is currently Head of State in 16 countries around the world).
·         And what this amorphous phrase the “social union” is supposed to mean is anyone’s guess.

One independent blogger put it rather well when he commented that  -

Having listened to the position of those who favour Scottish independence I have reached the view that they are not arguing for independence but for autonomy within some greater union which protects Scotland and its economy. I have yet to hear any voice demanding true independence.

It was only in November that the Scottish Government leaders issued the much-heralded White Paper on Scotland’s future. It may have looked focused (with 500 questions) and well-researched (with 670 pages) but most of it is “aspirational” – with everything depending on what will clearly be hard-fought negotiations.  About such things as the scale of public debt to be taken by an independent country; what will happen to the pound; and the terms of entry to NATO and the EU.

The efforts which have been made by “unionists” these past few weeks to indicate the risks associated with such uncertainties have, as I indicated at the time, been totally counter-productive.

The problem is that public figures supporting the unionist argument have no credibility. They belong to a political class which is now totally despised – belonging as it does either to rich upper-class, neo-liberal “Conservatives”; despised New Labourites who sold out, under Bliar, to neo-liberalism; or to Liberals who have proved more neo-liberal than them all. 

And the elevation of so many Labour MPs to the House of Lords – such as The Noble Lord, Baron Robertson of Port Ellen, The Noble Lord, Baron Reid of Cardowan, The Noble Baroness, Lady Liddell of Coat Dyke and The Noble Lord,Baron McConnell of Glenscorrodale  – now gives even them a foreign and feudal air which does not sit well in these populist times. Robertson's recent speech is a classic example. One is tempted to say to him what Atlee famously said to Harold Laski in the late 1940s -  "a period of silence on your part would be welcome".

As the "yes" vote swells, it seems almost as if there is no longer anyone serious left to fight!

The “slippery slope” is no more, it seems. The ground is more level - and therefore even more dangerous to “sleepwalkers”

A Challenge to the Separatists

Two books on Scottish issues were waiting for me at the English bookshop in Bucharest – the first a dry technical treatment of the debate on Scottish independence; the second a much more lively and courageous book which breaks away from the constraints of the “yes-no” framework and looks at various local struggles for more power which have taken place in the past few decades in different parts of Scotland. Housing and land ownership and health inequalities have tended to be the subject of these campaigns.

In the early 1970s, I was one of a small group which pushed (successfully) for recognition of the scale of urban deprivation in the West of Scotland. Our strategy of positive discrimination ran for more than 20 years - with community development as its central accompanying element. The Scottish government of 1997 took over those commitments - and has continued them since.

In those days, we assumed that the scale of the poverty we encountered within such a significant section of the population reflected the heavy industry in the area – with the insecurity of employment which went with it. But more recent research has suggested there is a “Scottish effect” which affects even those who live middle-class lives.

Various hypotheses have been proposed to account for the effect, including vitamin D deficiency, cold winters, higher levels of poverty than the figures suggest, high levels of stress, and a culture of alienation and pessimism

Lesley Riddoch has been an eloquent and campaigning Scottish journalist since the 1980s. Her book - Blossom - is inspiring, and makes a clear, coherent case for community ownership and more devolution at a local level. 
Since we Scots gained our Parliament 15 years ago, there has been nothing to stop such developments - except the mind-set of the Scots themselves!

The book is, for me, a unique challenge to explain the persisting disempowerment and inequality in Scottish society - particularly in the excellent use it makes of comparisons with Scandinavian countries -

Through a thorough and enlightening examination of our history Ms Riddoch argues that Scots have an inherited tolerance for inequality. Centuries of feudal land ownership and the many social ills that has spawned – such as unaffordable housing and chronic over-crowding- have taught us not to expect access to our own resources.

As a result we are politically disengaged and completely unaware of our own capabilities and capacity for change. For centuries, Scots living at the mercy of distant landlords meant high rents, bad treatment and insecurity; feudal landownership created a huge landless class, most of whom had no choice but to inhabit industrialised areas where they were further exploited. No poor law meant work or die.

However, this was not a universal experience. In Norway and Denmark, many workers were also landowners- and those who moved with the tide of industrialisation into towns and cities were given access to allotments and small plots of land by way of compensation. Even In England, where many workers had historically been freeholders, the urbanised working classes were accommodated in terraced housing- allowing them access to a front and back garden as compensation for the upheaval from their rural roots. The Scottish crisis in land ownership led to a second one in housing and chronic overcrowding in Scotland’s towns and cities.

The Royal Commission on Housing in 1917 found an ‘almost unbelievable density’ in Scotland compared to England, a trend that continued to grow throughout the twentieth century.In 1951, census results showed that 55 per cent of Glasgow’s population were living in chronically overcrowded conditions – compared to just 0.5 per cent of their counterparts in London. Even in the 1970s and 80s Scots continued to live with an epidemic of dampness spreading through cheaply built social housing. 

The point – according to the author – is this; we are a nation of people accustomed to bad treatment and inequality; ‘such a profound experience of deprivation doesn’t easily leave folk memory.’She goes on to suggest that behavioural patterns and cultural preferences are determined by the an inherited template of inequality. Because generations of our predecessors endured some of the worst living and working conditions, today we tolerate the same injustices in their modern day incarnations – and think nothing of it.The largeness of the country estates owned by a handful of elites has been transferred onto every other aspect of our lives and we blindly trust in distant authority and centralised power instead of the capacity of the average person. 

Scotland has the largest councils in Europe and the lowest level of democratic activity. Staggeringly, in France 360’000 local councils exist compared to our 32.We don’t make decisions about what affects us locally because we’ve never owned and controlled the land we live on, and voter turnout is pitifully low because historically landownership was a precondition of enfranchisement.

Today 25 per cent of Scotland’s estates have been owned by the same family for over 400 years, and tenants of these estates still live in fear of speaking out against landowners should their lease fail to be renewed.Poor Scots don’t exercise or eat well – we are the sick man of Europe and die young because that’s the way it has always been. We continue to live within the fourth most unequal state in the world where the gulf between the richest and the poorest is obscene by any civilised society’s standards.The voices of women are excluded from public life as if it that were absolutely normal and we tolerate some of the lowest levels of female representation in our parliament and public bodies. We also let very rich men who were gifted everything they have by accident of birth tell us that the poor and underprivileged of our country are to blame for their circumstances – and should expect nothing from them.

As a trustee of the Isle of Eigg Trust, Ms Riddoch was involved in the historic 1997 community buy-out of the Island. Prior to the buy-out many inhabitants lived within the confines of one room to conserve heat. Diesel was the expensive and often inaccessible fuel they relied upon entirely. As no land was made available for a rubbish tip, most people shared their already limited living space with rats, and the majority lived without leases.

After years of struggling to finance the buyout, today, the Isle of Eigg is one of Scotland’s most capable communities, tackling problems such as climate change and depopulation head on. In 2008, diesel was finally replaced with a mini grid integrating solar, wind and hydro energy known as Eiggtricity. By 2009, emissions had been cut by a third and the Eiggachs now have a much sought after and elusive asset – affordable energy security.

A co-operatively owned estate near South Lanarkshire is another success story. Tired of tolerating the damp, badly heated and insecure towerblocks they inhabited, the tenants of West Whitlawburn formed the Steering Committee of a Housing Co-op in 1989.

Describing her visit to the estate in 2010, Ms Riddoch explains the sharp contrast between the west and the neighbouring council owned East Whitlawburn estate where icy paths, single glazed windows and disintegrating brick work were still ubiquitous.

In the west, paths were cleared every morning and alarms fitted in the homes of the most vulnerable tenants. People took it in shifts to monitor CCTV screens and provide cups of tea in the middle of the night to any of the 70 vulnerable tenants who buzzed down for whatever reason. 11 deaths have been prevented because of this monitoring system, and the co-op have produced social accounts providing facts and figures proving that their way of doing things saves lives and cash – for anyone who is any doubt that community ownership is the way to go.

The Eiggachs, tenants of West Whitlawburn and others like them – Ms Riddoch states – were only able to reach their potential once they had full access to their own resources and decision making at a local level. This is a message which will resonate well with independence supporters, and clearly one that the author feels is at least somewhat relevant to the current constitutional debate. 

Nevertheless, it is an indictment that in a country which considers itself a modern democracy: “So much effort had to be expended…to reach a level of fairness that’s been normal in other neighbouring nations for centuries”.Despite the success of the Eiggachs and the tenants of West Whitlawburn, community ownership is still not a mainstream option in housing provision. The Eigg buy-out put land reform on the political agenda, and the Land Reform Act was passed by the Scottish Parliament in 2003, but very few communities have taken advantage of the Scottish Land Fund to finance Buyouts. There is a very practical reason for this – the community buyout model is too intimidating for most, and politicians routinely advocate for community ownership without coughing up the resources to make it happen.

Land Reform is one of the most pressing issues facing Scotland and Ms Riddoch suggests the swift introduction of a land tax would be the most sensible way to bring that about. However, community buyouts alone will not rectify the disempowerment felt across Scotland.Although the author doesn’t devote too much time to the explicit discussion of next year’s vote, there are important messages here for Independence campaigners. Ms Riddoch warns it is possible that “Such a divided, unequal nation is unlikely to push wholeheartedly for a cause like Scottish independence. why bother when folk have smaller fish to fry?”

She maintains that “change will only come when people can visualise things being otherwise” – this is an important point which is frequently made by other progressive commentators such as Gerry Hassan. Knowing what we know about the Scottish psyche, it is essential that the broader Yes campaign move heaven and earth to spark imaginations and – although it is beginning to sound like a platitude – provide a real ‘vision’ for the future of Scotland. This can be achieved by allowing the terms of the debate to be shaped by as many sections of the population as possible. In the process people who might now be disengaged will find the confidence to participate in building the independent country we hope to see. The fact that so many are already by-passing the official campaign in favour of grass roots movements such as National Collective and Radical Independence is of course the strongest indicator we have that a Scotland closer to the democratic and empowered one Ms Riddoch provides us with snap shots of here is possible. 

Trusting the people of Scotland to build a better society from the bottom up is an essential step in empowering them to take the leap towards national self determination.

Don't even try to understand the significance of the painting! I just couldn't find a suitable one for the subject of the post - and therefore chose this opaque but stunning piece by Tony Todorov, a favourite of mine introduced to me by Vihra of Astry Gallery in Sofia. He spends most of his time in Cyprus.......

The Status Quo is not on offer

The Anthony Frost English Bookshop in Bucharest has quite a few books on the Scottish Independence debate waiting for me – which I hope to pick up later in the week when I make the (very pleasant) 5 hour drive up there. 

In the meantime, I am catching up with the content of the 3 blogs which are dedicated to the constitutional aspects of the debate. 

Notes from North Britain (a blog written by Adam Tomkins, Prof in Public Law at Glasgow University) is proving to contain first-class material – this post from a year ago gives an important bit of the recent history and makes the critical point that a No vote is not a vote for the status quo 

The SNP first assumed office following the Scottish parliamentary election in 2007. Alex Salmond became First Minister as leader of the largest single party in Holyrood. The SNP did not in those days have the overall majority of seats in Holyrood that they have enjoyed since 2011 but they were, by a solitary seat, the largest single party. They ruled for four years as a minority administration. 

Alarmed at the advent of Nationalist rule, the three Unionist parties in the Scottish Parliament established an all-party commission to review Scottish devolution and to make recommendations as to its further development. This review, known as the Calman Commission, reported in 2009. The thrust of its recommendations was accepted by the then Labour Government in Westminster, and when Labour lost power in 2010 their broad acceptance of Calman was not reversed by the incoming Coalition. On the contrary, Calman was embraced by the Coalition as it had been by Labour.
 The result was fresh legislation in Westminster to augment the powers of the Scottish Government, to enlarge the powers of the Scottish Parliament, and generally to reboot Scottish devolution. That legislation was passed last year and is called the Scotland Act 2012. 

Let’s pause here to notice one thing. If you like devolution (and, indeed, if you’d like to see more of it), note who has delivered it. Labour created it in 1997-98 (with the original Scotland Act 1998) and the Tory / Lib Dem Coalition, with Labour’s support, delivered round two in 2012. The Scotland Act 2012 is not the promise of future powers. It has been enacted. It has been passed. It is the law of the land. It has been delivered. The Unionist parties — all three of them — have delivered what they promised. We have grown so used to politicians failing to deliver on their promises that it is just worth noting that this failure has not been repeated in the case of Scottish devolution. 

And, now, note this. The SNP opposed both the moves to create devolution in 1997-98 and the moves to enhance it in 2009-12. So, what does the Scotland Act 2012 do?
- Some of the changes are massive. Huge new borrowing powers are conferred on Scottish Ministers, for example, in order to assist them with the planning and delivery of Scottish public policy.
- And unprecedented tax powers are conferred on the Scottish Parliament, representing the biggest internal shift of fiscal power away from Westminster since the Acts of Union, no less.

Again, it is important to reiterate that these are not idle promises of what might be done in the future (“vote NO and then we’ll see”).All of this has already been delivered (“vote NO to preserve what’s already done”).

The new powers will significantly alter the nature of the powers which MSPs have. Thus far, their fiscal powers have been sharply focused on deciding how to spend public money, and a number of the achievements of Scottish devolution have been decisions to spend public money differently from how it is spent by Ministers in London. But, thanks to the Scotland Act 2012, MSPs will now also have powers to decide how to raise public money: that is to say, decisions over taxation. Decisions about tax are among the most sensitive that politicians have to make.
 The aim of the Scotland Act 2012 is that, by handing these powers to MSPs in Holyrood, the Scottish people will think ever more carefully about the sorts of folk they want to elect to the Scottish Parliament (“with power comes responsibility” and all that). 

Now, the scheme of the 2012 Act is that the handing over of tax powers from MPs in Westminster to MSPs in Holyrood will be staggered.
It’s not all going to happen at once in a rash fit of fiscal irresponsibility. To start with, the focus will be on income tax, as well as on one or two more minor duties such as stamp duty and landfill tax. But — and here is the beauty of the Scotland Act 2012 — the Act provides that new taxes may be devolved to the Scottish Parliament without the need for any fresh Westminster legislation. We know, for example, that Scottish Ministers have said that they wish to be able to set their own rates of corporation tax. A lower rate (such as Ireland’s) might attract additional international investment into the Scottish economy, the SNP have argued. The SNP may or may not be right about that, but let us assume that they are correct.

The Scotland Act 2012 contains the trigger that can enable the power to set rates of corporation tax to be devolved from London to Edinburgh without any further parliamentary time having to be taken up. All that needs to happen is for the Scottish Ministers to make a case to the UK Government that this needs to happen in the Scottish national interest and, as long as the UK Government is persuaded, the power can be devolved without further ado. 

This is why I say that there is no such thing as the status quo in Scottish politics. Responsibility for income tax in Scotland is set to become shared for the first time between Scotland’s two governments (in Edinburgh and London). Responsibility for new and further taxes can and will be devolved to Scottish Ministers as soon as the Scottish Ministers make the case that this should be done. Devolution has always been a fluid and flexible regime. The Scotland Act 2012 makes it even more fluid and flexible. 

The choice that confronts us on referendum day is a choice not between “change” and “no change” but between the SNP’s vision for change and everybody else’s. A NO vote is a vote FOR the ongoing fluidity and flexibility, development and growth of devolution. The only party that opposes this vision is the SNP.

Deepening the Scottish debate

There’s been a lot of discussion in the past decade about the extent to which such things as the social media and blogs are changing the media and politics. I am no fan of newspapers. Indeed I have not bought one for 20 years. Although I go to The Guardian website every morning, I do so for its articles rather than news - simply because media coverage of critical issues such as the debate on Scottish Independence is so superficial. Indeed, lets call a spade a spade - its piss-poor! 
The media and politicians are caught in a vicious circle of one-sided simplifications. The marketing philosophy which is our new religion has everyone convinced that the public does not have the attention span of a gnat. So we are fed a steady diet of headlines and short statements.

Weekly and monthly journals are not much better – The London Review of Books and Vanity Fair are rare in the licence they (occasionally) give to writers such as James Meek and Michael Lewis to write 10,000 word articles. For serious writing, you have to go bi-monthly journals such as New Left Review or The Political Quarterly - although, so far, even these titles have failed to give the issue of Scottish Independence the attention it deserves….

To get serious consideration, you have to go to a few dedicated websites and blogs. In the posts of the last couple of days I referred to the website of the UK Government - which has been issuing a series of issue assessments called “Scottish Analysis”. The UK Parliament’s Select Committee on Scottish Affairs has also been conducting its own hearings and reports (although the latter are seen as rather partial)

Probably the most useful website is one set up 2 years ago on the initiative of academics across the law schools of the Scottish universities. It seeks to provide an independent framework within which the key questions concerning Scotland's constitutional future can be aired and addressed – and is called The Scottish Constitutional Futures Forum. Its site gives all the key documents, a timeline and offers links to current debate. 

Two very useful blogs have been active for some years – Devolution Matters is an individual blog which 

aims to help inform debate about devolution and the UK’s ‘territorial constitution’, drawing on my academic and professional knowledge.  Much of the debate tends to be conducted in black-and-white terms (‘devolution’ versus ‘independence’ and so forth), when the reality is more complicated.  This blog will try to illuminate current issues, and explain the constitutional, technical and administrative issues involved.  It draws on my knowledge of those matters, which means it focuses chiefly on devolution to Scotland and Wales, and the implications of that for the UK as whole.  I am less involved in issues relating to Northern Ireland or the governance of London, and so have less to say about those issues.

UK Constitutional Law is a collective blog which goves public law scholars the opportunity to expatiate on a range of constitutional issues of which the devolution of power is only one.

One important post considered the uncertainties surrounding a “yes” result – looking in particular at the timetable and the complications which would ensue from the uncertainties about (i) EU negotiations, (ii) the General UK election of 2015 and(iii) the Scottish elections of 2016.

Finally a new project at the IPPR Think Tank has started to explore a “Devo More”option – against the possibility that the Scottish people reject Independence but wish to continue (as they certainly do) the push for greater powers.

This is the third in a series of postings this week on the issue of Scottish Independence - a referendum on which will be held(for the Scots) on 18 September.

Hanging Together???

Two things you wouldn’t pick up from media coverage of the Scottish referendum are that –

·         60% of UK public spending in Scotland is handled by the Scottish Government – devolved since 1999

·         A significantly additional amount is slated to be given to the Scottish Government – under powers granted in a Bill approved in 2012 which will, however, only be implemented if Scotland votes “No” in the referendum.

I had cleared today to look more deeply (as an ex-pat Scot) at the issues involved in the historical vote which will ‘take place in September. It must be one of the world’s most transparent and sustained dialogues – it’s been going on for 2 years since 2014 was first announced as the date. Slovakians were offered nothing similar 22 years ago and the recent Crimean vote was simply a farce.  

A new blog (for me) Notes from North Britain gave me a useful quotation -

The choice before us in September is not “independence versus the status quo”; “change versus no change”. A No vote is guaranteed to mean that devolution will change and develop. How do I know this? I know it because it’s already been legislated for, in the Scotland Act 2012. This Act, described at the time of its enactment by the then Secretary of State for Scotland as the largest transfer of fiscal powers within the United Kingdom in its history, will bring to Holyrood a substantial degree of fiscal devolution. These new powers — as long as Scotland votes No to independence — will come fully into force in 2015 and 2016. Now, this is not “jam tomorrow”, as Nationalists sometimes claim: it has already been legislated for. So the choice we face on 18 September is one between bringing devolution to an end (for there will be no devolution if Scotland becomes independent) and developing devolution further.

And I was then led to what are clearly 2 key texts – the first a statement from the Chairman of the Yes Campaign which bears the rather Boon and Mills’ title - We Belong Together. The second is a more academic approach which also sports a rather curious title “Hanging Together” . You will find the voluminous official Scottish Government White Paper arguing the case for independence in a previous blogpost.

My attention span, however, for such analyses is not what it once was - and I was quickly sidetracked by a visit to the second-hand Elephant English bookshop a few minutes away. In particular by a couple of books from the 1990s and 2000s about the Naples Bay area; and by Paul Theroux’s Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (2008) which has him revisit a heroic 5,000 km train journey he undertook in the 1970s......

So the various papers which the British Government have been publishing in the last year to help inform Scottish voters about the issues involved will have to wait until I return from my diversions. Those impatient to get on with things could have a look at this.

Drifting Apart

There’s less than 6 months to go to the referendum on Scottish independence. The wind is in the sails of those who want to cut loose from England…..a few months back those disposed to vote “Yes” to the question about independence  accounted for only a third of the electorate . Thanks to what is widely seen as bully tactics by those with political and financial power, those in favour of independence are now within a few points of those disposed to say no.

My father was Scottish; my mother English. I left Scotland 24 years ago but still strongly identify with the social democratic ethic of the nation (and it is – and always has been – a nation, with its own legal, religious and educational sovereignty). The different culture is evident from the fact that only one Conservative politician (out of 75) represents a Scottish seat in Westminster. And all Scots are increasingly alienated from a neoliberal Coalition Government which has been in power since 2010 in London. The Scottish Parliament and Government (Executive) which has been in power in Edinburgh since 1999 has differentiated itself strongly from that ideology – not least since the Scottish Nationalist gained an overall majority in 2007. But is this alienation a sufficient reason to cut off the ties with England which we’ve had since 1707?

As an ex-pat who has no vote (no residence) who follows the various discussion threads, I am amazed at the self-confidence of all who take part. Where is the agnosticism and scepticism which such a portentous issue requires…..??

Donald Rumsfeld is not normally someone I would quote, but his comment about “unknown unknowns” deserves respect and understanding.  In all the discussion, I have seen no serious attempt to develop different political, fiscal and social scenarios for Scotland let alone England.

It is obvious that a highly- developed country of 5 million people could operate as a nation state – there are about 40 members of the United Nations and a quarter of EU member states with smaller populations.

The real questions are more on the following lines -

·       How independence would affect the dynamics of trade, currency and investment (public and private) in Scotland - and in the residual (disunited) Kingdom

·       With different scenarios for relations with Europe and the Euro

·       What precise additional benefits will independence give which the traditional and post 1999 measures of Devolution don’t

·       How these benefits measure against the risks suggested in the first two sets of questions….    

At the personal level, I face a future where 2 of my daughters would have passports from a different country; in which I’m not even sure what form my 2015 passport (and driving license) will take; nor in which denomination my (yet unclaimed) pension will be paid. All minor nuisances, I readily agree, compared with the anguishes of migrants in the Europe of the first half of the 20th century......

One of the few discussions which reflects my concerns was on the site of the Royal Society of Edinburgh -

However, there is much that Scots currently take for granted, aspects of good government at the micro-level, that might be threatened by independence. Will an independent Scottish state have to replicate the entire panoply of government ministries and public agencies, many of which benefit from economies of scale and are run – relatively speaking – cheaply and smoothly as British-wide institutions? How much would it cost Scotland, for instance, to set up its own equivalent of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency at Swansea or, alternatively, to contract in to it from outside the United Kingdom? In other areas of public administration, the costings will be more elusive. By contrast with the humdrum and unspectacular efficiency of the DVLA, the BBC provides a compelling example of a widely loved service, whose broadcasting role in Scotland would be precarious in the event of independence.Moreover, notwithstanding coded talk of a ‘social union’, welfare and pensions are, of course, likely to be even touchier subjects for Scots. Unionists need to capture for themselves the rhetoric of social union.Obviously, matters of public administration and the distribution of benefits do not capture the imagination of the wider public in the same way as centuries of grievances – or imagined grievances – concerning the overbearing behaviour of a richer and more powerful neighbour.

Nevertheless, such is the complexity of modern society that an interlocking set of effective UK-wide bureaucracies – however dull and uninspiring a subject for campaign slogans – is not to be lightly jettisoned without overwhelming good cause.

The House of Commons Select Committee on Scottish Affairs is chaired by an ex-colleague of mine who was notorious all of 30 years ago for his duplicity and who does not seem to have improved much with his added years. This site gives an insight, however, into the seriousness with which that committee at least has taken the issue of separation and this evidence gives a sense of how the economic aspects are being explored