Yeah even unto the Middle Ages

I’ve always been interested in confidence, partly by dint of pure narcissism. When it comes to self-assertion, I’ve long felt like two souls in the same body, the one self-possessed, the other possessed by irrational, inadequate self-doubt. I will thoughtlessly take on challenges which would make many folk shiver and choke. I can stand up, noteless and half prepared in thronging rooms full of people, and put in a brisk oratorical turn. Somehow, perhaps sometimes misguidedly, I’m sure that I’ll put in a decent performance and that somewhere in my skull, relevant thoughts clatter about and will dutifully assemble themselves into something coherent at the indicated moment. 

If you and I met, or in company, I can be brisk, cheerful, inquisitive, intimate – but if the spirit of confidence deserts me, I find myself prey to irrational hindrances, unlyrical, stoppered, odd – even, or perhaps particularly, about small, unconscious acts and ordinary things. It is exhausting to be useless, and generally pointless. The source of one's inadequacies are rarely as formidable as they seem, when your mind spins off into gyroscopic anxiety. Over time, with a growing sense of myself, this doubleness has receded, but across my short life, this Jekyll and Hyde attitude to confidence has both tested and tended to confuse those around me: teachers, colleagues, friends. I find it confusing too. 

Folk often seem to assume that confidence is a zero-sum sort of calculation: either you are graced with it, or you are bereft: bumptious or a trembler. That’s not my experience. Teaching undergraduates in tutorials and seminars also opens a window into self-assertion's fickle ways. I've known students who you'd need a crowbar or a picklock to coax into speaking during the session, but who explode into vivacious little creatures as soon as the class breaks and the tutor's not-terrifically baleful eye leaves them.

A little flicker crosses the face of others - the cue that they've got something to say - but an encouraging prod is required if the thought, however cogent, is to be expressed. The heedless confidence of others outstrips their capacity. Being alive to this psychological dimension of the encounter is one of the unexpected, rewarding but challenging, parts of teaching.  This work has persuaded me, more than ever, that confidence isn't just a matter of personal psychology - it is structural. We build it up or leave it to atrophy in families and institutions. 

Yesterday, Alex Massie tacked this post over at the Spectator, asking "Who cares if English commentators like or respect Scotland?" Confidence is at the essence of the piece, but Alex's argument is multi-pronged. Surely being desperately concerned about the good opinion of others isn't really an expression of confidence, but actually craven and a bit needy? Isn't it outsourcing your self-esteem to other folk, making your happiness and equanimity contingent on their good or bad conceits of you? But Alex doesn't stop there, taking a swipe at what he perceives as a tendency amongst Yes advocates to regard:

"... anyone voting No this September lacks confidence in Scotland. A No voter, you see, bears the mark of the Scottish cringe and if that’s not obviously or prominently displayed on his napper it surely scars his conscience."

I wonder though if Alex isn't at risk of conflating a few issues. I agree that seeking externally for approval is no expression of confidence, but the opposite. On the other hand, while I don't think voting No is necessarily an expression of lack of confidence, and some Scots doubtless feel perfectly chipper and self-assertive within the UK, I sit with the folk Massie criticises: for most folk, the decision to vote No won't a vindication of healthy, pith-helmeted British imperiousness, but an expression of lack confidence. As Massie rightly contends, you meet plenty of Scots who would would scratch their head at the idea that Scottishness is a wooden leg within the United Kingdom.

The theme of this Saturday's session of David Greig's All Back to Bowie's #indyref Fringe discussion is Tactful Cactus – Is There a Scottish Establishment? Having passed through private schooling in Glasgow, Edinburgh law school and Oxford, I'm familiar with the mindset of the folk Alex is referring to and to a significant extent participate in it.  These institutions generated and continue to generate folk, unawed and at home in cloistered corridors. You can still imagine many of these unselfconscious bluffers donning rifles and linen suits and setting sail to rule some luckless corner of the British imperial map. Such are the wages of privilege.

Visiting the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, and then wander around the New Town, has a similar effect. I'm always struck by the continuity of feel. The faces of the periwigged worthies of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries easily transposed onto the bustling suits and polished shoes of today. Watching Edinburgh's bourgeois tribes clip confidently through the neo-classical architecture, I'm always reminded of the scene from Chris Mullin's Very British Coup, where the ancient establishment functionary explains to the socialist Prime Minister why the security services have conspired against his government. As Harry Perkins says, these are "people who remain quiet, behind the scenes, generation after generation, yeah even unto the middle ages."

Doctors, judges, bankers, Faculty men, Scotland Office mandarins, these well-heeled, black-coated gentlemen did and continue to do the British state some service. The pacts struck by the Ghost of Henry Dundas still commands allegiances. The High Court of Justiciary which convicted and transported Thomas Muir for sedition still sits, in some important sense. For most Scots, this is a bewildering world apart, but having encountered it, one cannot but be struck by its robust sense of self, and its unselfconscious confidence in the exercise of power. Quietly, behind the scenes, yeah even unto the middle ages.

The SNP have adopted the mantra that Scotland can, should and must be independent. For my money, the Yes campaign has made good headway with the idea that we should be independent, but we're still struggling to persuade people that we can. In bridging that gap, confidence matters. If we fail, the Yes campaign must bear the weight of blame. But for the overwhelming majority of folk, unsteeped in what can sometimes seem like the uncritical hive mind of the Scottish establishment, I struggle to believe that a No vote would represent a happy, dauntless vindication of Scotland's place in Britain. If this referendum has revealed one thing, it is that Scots allegiance to the British state is - perhaps disturbingly - provisional.

WARNING: unsupervised triangulation kills.

Over the summer, I borrowed the first volume of Chris Mullin's (2009) diaries from my father. As the title of the collection - A View from the Foothills - implies, Mullin was a creature of the lower slopes in Tony Blair's Labour government, and after the 2005 General Election, was booted even further down the incline, evicted from his comfortable bothy as African Minister in the Foreign Office, to no obvious purpose. The book is full of diverting incident and character-sketches from the period, cataloguing the effects of Blair's extroverted charm, but also the former Prime Minister's tendency towards shallowness and mercurial shifts in activity, sprayed with new management sloganising about modernisation and reform. 

Although not an unsympathetic authorial voice, the image of Mullin I carry in my head suffers from him reminding me of the League of Gentlemen's toad-collector, Harvey Denton.  He has something of the dowdy geography teacher about him. I'm sure he wears cagoules, enjoys a good cup of tea, and if he's feeling racy - perhaps pairs the cup with a modest crumb of fruit cake. Endowed with a very English sort of flaccidness, Mullin is unfashionable, understated, polite, and I imagine a decent cove - but remains somehow bloodless, and a bit ponderous with it.  

Having enjoyed the first book well enough, I recently cracked open the second volume of the diaries, which run from May 2005 to May 2010.  Its title, Decline and Fall (2010), maps the end both of Mullin's political career, and that of Gordon Brown, and his abortive premiership.  I'm only a short ways into the text, but was particularly struck by this entry, dated Monday 21st November 2005. 

The Strangers' Cafeteria, House of Commons

Joined at lunch by a Yorkshire MP, a mild-mannered fellow, incensed by The Man's [Blair's] latest foray into education.  "We're opening the door for selection.  Whatever safeguards we put in place, whatever assurances we give will be absolutely worthless once the Tories are in power". And then: "I think we will lose the next election.  The Tories will come to some sort of understanding with the Lib Dems and we'll find that we've opened the door to the market in health and education.  And when we protest, they will reply, "But this is your policy; you started it. We'll be vulnerable for years.  Our benches will be full of ex-ministers who won't have the stomach for the fight".  As he talked his anger mounted and most of it was directed at The Man.  A straw in the wind.

A cardinal lesson, I'd say, that when you adopt the discourse of your opponents, when you co-opt their vocabulary and their concepts, you might think you are working a neat political trick, triangulating your way to triumph.  For a time, it might seem as if you've wrong footed your enemies, as they struggle to compose salient responses to your unexpected theft of their political costumes. The proponents of this sort of thing will always have soothing, apparently practical, words to allay any intellectual pangs you might feel.  

This logic can take singularly grotesque forms.  I'd hazard a guess that something like it was implicated in Phil Woolas' Oldham West and Saddleburn campaign in the 2010 general election. What if adopting a soft anti-immigrant rhetoric could keep the real racist bastards out? Wouldn't you, shouldn't do it? Isn't that really the right thing for an anti-racist to do, to make sure the real racists don't get in? Whatever we actually say and do, we know we're all really working for the cause, don't we?  Sure, it's ugly, but the end justifies the means, can't you see that?

Becoming adept in a secular sort of mental reservation is critical for the tyro triangulator.  The tragedy of such strategies, however, is that most of the time, they're simply too clever by half.  Instead of burglarising your opponents' political house while keeping your own ideological soul intact, more often than not, that soul very quietly, often imperceptibly, transmogrifies into theirs. The dismal fact is that triangulation is a way of letting your opponent win, whether you retain office, or they boot you out.  It is a recipe for an asphyxiating political consensus, for conceding your opponents' "common sense", and not for victory on something like your own ideological terms.

How prescient that parliamentarian from Yorkshire proved.  Lessons here, both for the UK Labour Party which Miliband is trying to resurrect, and after last week's NATO vote at Conference, for the SNP too, I'd reckon.