On being the cartographers of a new Scotland...

Those of you who have been lurking about here a good while will be familiar with my ideas about Alex Salmond's speech-making powers. Of his remarks in Aviemore in 2010, and then at the SNP Conference in Perth later that year, I suggested that he performs gallantly enough compared to your average punter or your commonplace politician. However, I've never been wholly convinced that delivering formal, buttoned-up addresses is the Maximum Eck's real forte. For me, his talents are primarily of an extempore character. Here's an excerpt from my earlier posts which sums up my view...

Whatever his virtues, Salmond is not a natural static orator. A whiff of domesticity always seems to cling to him, that near-half-present jocularity that seems ill-suited to a lecture’s stolid gravity and the unspontaneous nature of  pre-prepared remarks. A harangue, he can do, but it will never been a particularly elegant affair. While he cuffs and clubs his way through First Minister’s Questions, he has the interesting habit of producing compound words in the heat of the phrase. Letters are dropped, syntaxes substituted, he roars and plunders on. The word ‘gusto’ seems to suit the First Minister, ironic mirth shoogling his aubergine-shaped frame, quick with the repartee. All of which contribute to a satisfyingly earthen sort of prowess. It isn’t the Senator, imparting sonorous wisdoms with gravity – or managerial listlessness. I’m not sure if I care for the politics of high inspiration, exactly; folk who clamber up on their soap boxes and then conspire to sound like bishops. It is sufficient to make my point, however, to say that I don’t think Salmond takes to this latter character terribly well. He’s more like one of the venal cardinals of Jacobean tragedy, jovially roving about in his belly-puffed red drapery, clutching a tart and a tankard.

His performance at this weekend's SNP Spring Conference in Glasgow tended to confirm my existing feelings. The Corbie has picked over the bones of the speech already. To pry a rib or two from her sharp beak, we should probably begin by asking who are conference speeches for? The serried activists in the audience, certainly - and a media whose shell-likes are bent for quotable passages and concrete messages. Your average voter is unlikely, I fancy, to give much of a fig.  Most of the public are likely to catch such snippets as are mentioned in the papers or those snatches  caught on the telly that evening. Their importance, it seems to me, is primarily atmospheric, allowing emphasis to be placed here or there. The speeches allow narratives and counter-narratives to pursued and buttressed by the press - and by party apparatchiks alike. We shouldn't indulge in a surfeit of poseurish cynicism limiting the good of such gatherings to their instrumental capacity to change public opinion. Conferences ought to be a site for discussion, for the articulation and vindication of collective values, even dare I say, the airing of debates. They're about diffusely enacted solidarity, or something along those lines.  The full text of Salmond's address can be read here. I just wanted to pick up on a few thoughts provoked by its final section.

"Delegates.

We have a rich land, but too many of our people live in poverty. We have a 21st century vision, but are held back by 19th century prejudices and structures. We are ready to play our part in the world, to help from the personal to the universal.If we are to become a crucible of the new society. Then we need the power of independence – we must have these powers. And there is only way of getting those, of making further advance. To vote for Scotland, not because we are better than anywhere else. But because we are the same people as people all over the world.

We seek fairness and justice and responsibility. And we are the lucky nation, rich enough to deliver it all, yet we cannot without power. Our sense of the common weal is strong and should not be denied by the rich elites of elsewhere. A Scotland caught between the universality of hope, and the parochialism of power for power’s sake. And as Labour peddle fear we have led hope.

We live in tough times, but when the decision came to protect family budgets, it was straight forward - the council tax freeze stays because it's worth more than £300 to the average family since 2007. The NHS budget could have been cut but for us it was a clear decision - the health service protects Scots young and old. Its budget is safe with the SNP. We have made Scotland secure not by the kneejerk nonsense of locking people up for short sentences, but by putting 1,000 extra police on the street and taking crime to a 32 year low. We have the best team on the park and we govern for the whole of Scotland.

But politics is nothing without a bigger vision. In government, much is in the day-to-day. But you must still keep an eye on the horizon. On the big prize. For us that prize is independence. But independence is a means to an end. That end is a society safe, happy, healthy. Confident in its skin. A global citizen acting to help the world where it can.Because the map makers’ ink is becoming smudged on every border. Globalism, the rise of the knowledge economy, the big economic changes, the great environmental challenges. All point to a world where the responsibility of the nation. Is to raise people who are responsible to the world.

And the definition of a nation is a community of people with a shared commitment to their culture and to their children. By having a strong sense of ourselves. That allows our new communities from Asia to know what it meant to be Scottish. And to give them something to join, to be part of. And that sense of self is built on community. On the shared value of helping each other out, lending a hand. On a sense that society should try to be as equal as it can be. That is what we value and what we think is the purpose of government. To the rights of the ordinary to triumph over vested interests.

In our capital city of Edinburgh there stands a monument to Thomas Muir and his fellow friends of the people. His memory should cast a beam across the work of every civil servant in the Scottish Government and every Minister – because the monument to Muir and his fellows revolutionaries spikes out of Calton graveyard like a shaft of stony light across from St Andrews House. And this monument contains Muir's own vision:

" ... “I have devoted myself to the cause of The People. It is a good cause - it shall ultimately prevail - it shall finally triumph.” ...

And his message was not just for this place, but for every place. For his spirit, for Robert Burns' spirit, Jimmy Reid’s spirit, our spirit. It is for the common weal. The rights of man - and of women. And the legitimacy of the ordinary over the powerful.

This party has travelled a similar path. This movement, this nation, has been patronised, talked down, told it wasn't good enough. And yet this party has risen from a few MPs and a land without a parliament, to a Scotland with a parliament, and an SNP government.

We never lost the strength of hope - and we fought on to triumph. But we, in our mix of the national and the international, of the personal and the political, we fought not to govern over people. But for the people to govern over themselves. It is for that reason and that reason above all that we are the Friends of the People of Scotland and for that reason we shall prevail."

One of the things which has always interested me about the story of Thomas Muir is that his is not a Bannockburn story, or a misconstruction of Culloden along English vs Scots lines. Thomas Muir was ruined by Scottish elites - the despotism of Henry Dundas, 1st Viscount Melville - which was supported by the Tory "crony state" of its day. Taking the relatively moderate Muir to be its inveterate foe, Muir was crushed by Lord Braxfield and an obeisant Edinburgh jury in the High Court of Justiciary at the instance of the Lord Advocate, Robert Dundas of Arniston.  Along with his fellows, Muir was transported to Australia, then escaping to South America with an intention of heading north. The best laid plans... Muir's hopes were frustrated, and  his Candidesque journey was to continue. Ill-fortune stalking his footsteps, he was arrested by Spanish authorities and sent to Cuba, there to await sail to take him back to Spain. Having crossed the Atlantic, his ship was waylaid off the Spanish coast. Shrapnel tore into his face in the pitched naval battle with the British navy that ensued. Horribly injured, he was finally freed from Spain under the auspices of French diplomacy, dying in France on the 6th of January 1799, aged only thirty three. But I digress.

On the main thrust of this final peroration, the Maximum Eck's line from Perth was arguably neater - "I fight not for flags and anthems, but fairness and compassion". Nicola Sturgeon made the same connection explicitly in her address yesterday. Indeed, so pleased was she with the formulation, like Shakespeare, she said it twice, in case you missed it the first time:

"Fairness, justice and equality - these principles are the very essence of independence and that is why we are determined to win it for our country."

We may be familiar with these sort of themes, but we shouldn't forget that it is astonishing to hear nationalism articulated and envisaged in this way. I've long found inexplicable that longing one sometimes encounters amongst Labour supporters for the SNP to be a racist party - or the paranoid certainty that the SNP is "objectively" such a party, and that only a conscious PC fraudulence keeps private hatreds from public view. Nationalists frequently find ourselves responding to a snide managerialism that insists that the public don't care about independence. Annabel Goldie prefers to deploy what I think of as her High Tea rebuttal, which invariably involves "bread and butter" issues, dismissing nationalism as glitter-speckled fairy-cake (or fruitcakery, depending on what Bella's been baking...)  

This is patently an unworthy argument. I'm willing to entertain a vigorous discussion with folk who are pro-Union about the range of values involved. For example, the more thoughtful should be willing to concede that there are areas of policy where the sectional Scottish interest is simply different from some overall assessment of British priorities, refracted through particular ideological lenses. To admit such is hardly fatal for the Union case - for other saving values might be invoked. To put the case most strongly, it is perfectly possible to admit that self-governing Scotland might be better off  economically speaking - but the Union should be maintained. Now, such a position is not necessarily a particularly attractive one to defend - but my point is that it is not necessarily an incoherent view. We're in the realm of substantial politics here and the managerialist vision simply won't do.  It shouldn't satisfy Unionists either. What is an incoherent position, however, is to say that one wants to be independent to transform the character of the Scottish state - potentially to something along more Scandinavian lines - and simultaneously to imagine that ideological questions can be bracketed until after independence. A gradualist independence movement which predicates its political activity on the idea of a better and more virtuous Republic, defined along primarily political rather than ethnic lines - simply doesn't have the luxury of deferring ideological questions. As responses to this post indicated, some of you disagree. As I understand the position, you see the issue being one of the SNP being a vehicle to deliver independence, which will then afford an opportunity to choose what sort of state to choose to be. I disagree and take heart from the fact that Alex and Nicola are beginning more clearly to emphasise that nationalism is about your bread, your butter and your bacon. It is about the plate of food your neighbour sits down to of an evening, or if your neighbour hae no meat and cannae eat. Significantly, the remarks of both Salmond and Sturgeon undeniably go beyond a case for independence based on a delimited promise of bare autonomy.

I have a legal background and a sociological interest. I'm concerned with what actually happens in the world, in detail - rather than the crystalline structure of sovereignty or what was implicitly demurred in Salmond's speech - independence as an end in itself.  That also entails an interest in the concrete - in justice close to home - not a spangled, flighty goddess, pirouetting across the distant heavens. It is for this reason that the croaking, toad-perspective of Unionist managerialism is so deeply unattractive, soulless, heatless, heartless. I have no doubt that it is manifestly insufficient to cry "It is not too late to seek a newer world!". One has to man the oars, to haul and "smite the sounding furrows". However, to borrow an Eckly metaphor, our horizon is lit and our destination chosen according to  our political lights, our conception of justice, our understanding of possibilities and opportunities. Being the cartographers of a new Scotland is vital work, not secondary, not deferrable. I recently channelled Lewis Caroll to have a little fun at the expense of Iain Gray and his brother and sister Labour tribunes, in Punting the Snark. Leap one Fit on, however, and one finds a passable description of the SNP's political nationalism, if it is shed of ideological politics. Salmond is  much to be credited for not making this Bellman's Speech. However, our nationalist map-making is anything but complete.

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies--
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity, too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one looked in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,

Without the least vestige of land:

And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

A map they could all understand.

What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,

Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"

So the Bellman would cry and the crew would reply

"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

But we've got our brave Captain to thank"

(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best—

A perfect and absolute blank!"

Review: Eck's speech in Perth...

In March of this year, after the  SNP party conference in Aviemore, I made the gently controversial suggestion that Alex Salmond isn't a natural speech giver. A natural talker, a pugnacious and limber debater without question, but I often feel as if the motionlessness, uninteractive qualities of speechifying leeches away his more compelling rhetorical qualities: 

Whatever his virtues, Salmond is not a natural static orator. A whiff of domesticity always seems to cling to him, that near-half-present jocularity that seems ill-suited to a lecture’s stolid gravity and the unspontaneous nature of  pre-prepared remarks. A harangue, he can do, but it will never been a particularly elegant affair. While he cuffs and clubs his way through First Minister’s Questions, he has the interesting habit of producing compound words in the heat of the phrase. Letters are dropped, syntaxes substituted, he roars and plunders on. The word ‘gusto’ seems to suit the First Minister, ironic mirth shoogling his aubergine-shaped frame, quick with the repartee. All of which contribute to a satisfyingly earthen sort of prowess. It isn’t the Senator, imparting sonorous wisdoms with gravity – or managerial listlessness. I’m not sure if I care for the politics of high inspiration, exactly; folk who clamber up on their soap boxes and then conspire to sound like bishops. It is sufficient to make my point, however, to say that I don’t think Salmond takes to this latter character terribly well. He’s more like one of the venal cardinals of Jacobean tragedy, jovially roving about in his belly-puffed red drapery, clutching a tart and a tankard.

I note this by way of analysis rather than a stinging critical spirit.  Some speaker's have the easy lyricism and feeling of a Shakespearean actor, the range of emotion. Some have other virtues. Others have no appreciable virtues at all and barely blunder and stammer their way through others' pre-prepared remarks, sans passion, sans rhythm, sans everything. So how did the Maximum Eck fare in Perth? You can read the text here, but lifeless words on a digital page - while easier to scrutinise in terms of content - lacks much of the warmth and emphasis that delivery brings. We should also be aware of the mediating role of the camera lens - and how differently rhetoric can play in the room - but this recording gives you a better sense of what was said. The speech included some snappy lines, snappily delivered - Our water will not be privatised – not a tap, not a drop and plenty of intertextuality including Edwin Morgan, Robert Cunningham Graeme, Jimmy Reid.  I noticed that he twanged on one of my own favourite strings - that independence is not the radical irresponsibility of the teenage tearaway in the huff, but fundamentally a movement about civic participation, active citizenship - and the tensions of responsibility. Not to be prodded about, no longer to be spoken for, no longer secured in a biddable, bovine comfort that bobs to Westminster institutions, blinking credulously at their decisions, and abashedly saying "Whatever you say, sir. I'm sure these shackles will keep my wrists warm." Salmond used that critical word - responsibility early on in his remarks.

"Either Scotland stays in the Westminster straightjacket of low growth, public sector cutbacks and blighted futures or we take responsibility and deliver the better society we all want."

Popularly, folk seem agreed that by far the best section of the speech is the last five minutes or so. I think it is fair to say that Eck began and largely continued stoking his oratorical furnace in a workmanlike manner. As has two dominant tones - one wry Eck, jocular, slagging off Labour's Invisible Man and his attendant undead shadow cabinet - and then general speechifying Eck. At least to my ear, he has surprisingly few expressive shades of tone and feeling. In the final section, his speechwriters certainly demonstrated their prowess and with a far more stimulating tone, Salmond rose to the prose. Given his passionate attachment to its content, you can see why. Its a crucial concern - why independence? How to rebuff the familiar Unionist critiques of the position which by turns allege constitutional dreaming and obsession; distraction from the tyranny of bread, butter and the ordinary lives of Scottish people; vanity, bagpipes, shortbread, Romanticism, impracticability, even vacuity. Salmond, a chubby Sancho Panza, wobbling his mule along after the lean, wild-eyed and armorial Quixote of independence.  The answer that Eck had prepared for them resonated profoundly with me - and I imagine yesterday's Comprehensive Spending Review now inscribes the words with particular significance, the invocation of a better society all the more meaningful given a Westminster politics that is advancing such an opposed conception of what it means to be fair and equal and just. There are also little archaic touches of gravity in the writing. I'm sure "explain it thus" isn't a regular Eckly idiom, while the sentiment with which I entirely agree - "I fight not for flags and anthems, but fairness and compassion" - is in clear structural echo of Fergusson's English translation of the Declaration of Abroath - "It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself." Here are his closing remarks:

"We are not helpless agents of globalisation, but free citizens of a wealthy land. We are not slaves to the banking system or vassals to the lords of high finance.

"And nor are we the tartan clichés of media myth, or the historical poetry of yesterday. We are the prose of today, the facts of here and now, the truth of Scotland.

"And when we look to our neighbours, we can all see the family who can’t quite make ends meet, the child you needs some extra help, the grandmother alone who needs a hand, the mother struggling with hands full, the man at the end of his tether – for we are all the people who choose to live on this land, and by our shared values, we are the welfare of everyone in our community.

"We must never make the mistake of confusing having a national parliament with having a national purpose.

"I stand before you now not saying that independence is everything but saying that to protect our values is absolutely all, and to do this, within ourselves, is – all. And that is why having the powers are all.

"And perhaps when we have spoken of independence, we have assumed everyone else knew exactly what we meant.

"Well, should there be any doubt, then what I mean by independence is the profound right to enjoy the same equality of opportunity, and to live in more equal communities. What I mean by independence is jobs – to protect to create them.

"Is this a grand dream? Yes. But that is the difference between us and the other parties at this coming election. We have the vision, and we have the means to deliver it. For be assured. I do not want Independence for its own sake, but for the sake of the people here and now and those to come.

"I will not be a manager of Westminster directed cuts nor part of a parliament which acts as a message boy for decisions made elsewhere.

"I want to see a better nation. I want us to act together, in common purpose, to deliver that better land. I want you and everyone here in Perth, in this land, to know that having a parliament in itself is not enough.

"We need a purpose – and it is my purpose to get the powers to address our problems.

"I believe our people want a better society. Not a bit better, not a wee change, not some tinkering at the edges, but a better land full stop.

"Perhaps from now on I should explain it thus –

"The referendum we wish to have is first and foremost a jobs referendum. The Independence I seek is the independence to create jobs. The powers I wish for us all are powers to protect us all. This is not an arcane question removed from the people – it is the people, you and me, and how we protect our society, and grow our economy.

"That is what I mean by Independence. I fight not for flags and anthems, but fairness and compassion. I fight for a generation that is not burdened by the mistakes of this one.

"And as you know, I fight and I do not give up. I fight for this party, because I believe in our hearts we have nothing but goodness, and I fight for this nation because I believe the people of Scotland will choose a better way, a better society, and a fairer society as their way.

"And I fight in the knowledge that is a big fight. The cuts will be bad. The pain will be great. And I fight because I know how we should act.

"And I know where we are going – I am the First Minister of Scotland, and I intend to continue to be the First Minister of Scotland, not because I have all the answers, but because I have the absolute commitment, the experience and above all that sense of national purpose.

"I, we, have the purpose to make this a better land. Join us, be part of this, be part of better."