Scotland the Bold

Gerry Hassan

Freight £9.99

Review by Harry McGrath

GERRY HASSAN is not a man to use one word when six will do. Nouns, verbs and adjectives arrive in bunches and are conjoined into sentences of impenetrable wordiness. Even when concise, a Hassan sentence can result in a bout of head scratching. In his previous book Caledonian Dreaming, he “argued that the indyref and these other moments did not come from nowhere.”

As it turns out, this is the language of high ambition. His new book is “about modern Scotland, what it is, what it could become and what it might entail.” Unfortunately, Hassan’s powers of prophecy desert him at the first attempt when he declares that “Trump was always likely to fail on sheer demographics alone”.

The early chapters concentrate on the present and the recent past. They feature innumerable subheadings and subjects that are familiar to the point of ennui. For instance, if you want to rehearse the reasons for the decline of the Labour Party in Scotland you can do so again here. Ditto if you need a brief overview of the Thatcher years or feel the urge to rehash the Yes and No campaigns in the referendum.

There are repeated calls for diverse voices and new ways of speaking, including American writer Marshall Berman’s “Jaytalking”, ie the art of dangerous talking. That would be interesting if Hassan actually tried it. Instead potted analyses of problems at the BBC, the need to remove Trident or the shared Tory/Labour interest in preserving the Union, careen past without offering anything new. In fact, diverse or even new voices are conspicuously absent from the acknowledgements and the endnotes.

On social justice and inequality, Hassan at least has some suggestions. “Making the Case for an explicit Social Justice Agenda from Rich to Poor” is a typically mystifying subheading but beneath it he promotes affordable childcare, relief from private landlords, a more humane welfare system, land reform and so on. Nobody should object to any of this, but it is not new and most of it already has more articulate advocates.

The book ends with a “manifesto” consisting of ideas for an “alternative Scotland” courtesy of 80 invited respondents drawn from “an interesting cross-section”. Who wouldn’t want a national festival of stories held in Dundee, full adult literacy, happier, healthier lives, or a citizen’s income? The manifesto is intended to stimulate debate but it is not clear how it will do that given that most of it is either prescriptive or utopian.

There are always better ways to do what is already being done but only independent powers can change things utterly. For that, Hassan needs to look far beyond a few chosen people scattering ideas around like confetti. His forays furth of Scotland are tentative: a ramble through modern Irish history, a sideways glance at Greenland. They do not include Canada, which is an obvious example of the transforming power of bold ideas. It had to patriate a constitution from Westminster while resisting domination by its giant southern neighbour and eventually created its own Charter of Rights and Freedoms, removed entitlement from the immigration system and reinvented itself around big ideas like multiculturalism, diversity and bilingualism.

The confidence required to do this came from a Canadian renaissance that began half a century ago and produced great thinkers, writers and musicians. There wasn’t the same sense of an “independence journey” that currently exists in Scotland but the Scottish cultural and political conditions that pertain today are remarkably similar. In political terms, Scotland is also beginning to understand what Canada understood then: just because you are sleeping with an elephant doesn’t mean you have to mirror everything it does.

If Scotland is to boldly reinvent itself, it will be despite books like this rather than because of them. You don’t build a nation on a hodgepodge of ideas, poorly expressed. Worse, for all its talk of hope and optimism Scotland the Bold is a depressing read. The manifesto is full of suggestions for improving Scottish education and routine moaning about Police Scotland. It has nothing to say about the work being done, say, on microfinance for deprived communities by the Yunus Centre at Glasgow Caledonian University, or any of the numerous initiatives that are taking the country forward. Scotland, according to Hassan and his petitioners, is incapable of doing anything well (with the possible exception of managerial politics). The net effect is to diminish the place rather than embolden it.