  
National Fever/					 	 	Page 
	                    	                             NATIONAL FEVER.
The "Scottish Question" was promoted as a central issue during the Spring 
1992 UK election campaign. Nothing came of it. However, that failure may 
actually increase its wider significance as a failure of politics.

During the months prior to the election, the entire liberal-left anticipated 
change to the government of Scotland. This would be a break expressed through 
the normal channels. It would restore a continuity by throwing off a foreign 
yoke. It would express a popular will discontented with the available means 
of expression. How could such a consensus hold together? 

Previous articles in Here & Now have discussed the Scottish Constitutional 
Convention, a conglomerate of clerics, lawyers, local government bureaucrats 
and political bosses. This modernised Estates General brought  together those 
whose pivot is the State, but who hid behind loose statements about the Scots 
being more community-oriented than the English (a certain entry for a 1992 
Dictionary of Received Ideas). By reducing the developments in international 
capitalism through the 1980s to the imposition of "Thatcherism" on a people 
who didn't want it, those sectors who prospered in the corporatism of the 
discarded postwar settlement hoped to carve a niche for the 1990s. Theirs was 
a conservative defence of sectional interests against Tory neo-liberal 
radicalism. 

But the Convention's legitimacy within Scotland was precarious. It 
represented a "party for moderate progress within the bounds of the law", 
which needed forceful presence from both the independence position of the 
Scottish National Party and the campaign against the Community Charge, but 
representing neither. This was despite the wild projections of its popularity 
to audiences outside Scotland, boosted by those who hoped that  Scottish 
people might push forward their own programme. Convention architect Jim Ross 
now criticizes it for putting "little more than token endeavour" into trying 
to establish legitimacy. (Scotland on Sunday, 16/8/92). The Conventioneers 
had failed to organise their own planned referendum, but carried on choosing 
the wallpaper, confident that the 1992 election would install them in office. 
Repeating past mistakes, David Steel once more went home to "prepare for 
government".

In the event, they were first hit by a virus unleashed by media groups, not 
least for their own ends. The launch of the redesigned Scotsman  newspaper 
coincided with its publication of an opinion poll showing apparent 50% 
support for Scottish independence. The conversion of The Sun  to nationalism 
was more controversial, whether the motivation was populist or was calculated 
to enhance Conservative electoral chances by splitting the opposition. These 
media actions laid out the body politic for inspection and speculation. The 
Scotsman  followed this up with a series of excruciatingly worthy probes into 
the working of Scottish autonomy. Meanwhile, the Convention fell into 
disarray faced with the swelling inflammation. Prominent members conceded 
that they had lost the initiative in the months of procedural discussion.
 
The Scotsman group also organised a showpiece public debate between the 
Scottish party leaders, a supine simulation of debate: eyes forward and 
silence for the four stars on stage with a few questions after the set-piece 
speeches. Unpromising base material transformed by the apprentice sourcerers 
of the press: "The Scotsman's Great  Debate - four Scottish party leaders 
hammering out the political options in Edinburgh's Usher Hall -  was heard by 
hundreds of thousands live  on radio and watched by even more on BBC 
Scotland's edited highlights..."   (Pat Kane in The Guardian, ,6/2/92) 
"Hammering out the political options" has a tone of the craftsmanlike, a 
feeling of something tangible being beaten into shape.

History was assumed to be on the side of the constitutionalists. The 
Disruption in the former Soviet bloc has encouraged intellectuals' beliefs 
that they express a general interest. Positioned around local media centres, 
they began to see regional tv opt-out programming as providing something 
other than lip-service to public interest provisions. For Kane, the media 
"have been practising this kind of  tele-democracy north of  the border for 
years, arguably laying a ground of self-understanding that had to be 
transmuted eventually into a popular concern with power and democracy..."  . 
He announces "a general elision between political and cultural 
representation; that cultural autonomy has been a crucial substratum for 
political autonomy".

If Dr. Kane's examination produced an over-optimistic bill of health, it was 
partly due to a confusion with the state of his group practise. The past 
decade has indeed brought a form of "cultural autonomy", in that material 
success for Kane, Deacon Blue and Runrig within Scotland would have been 
unlikely before then. But any valuation should take account of the particular 
market segments to which they play, in a not dissimilar way to big-gesture 
groups elsewhere, as well as the extent to which the breweries (whose 
political allegiances are well known) have formed and re-formed the 
vocabulary and concept of home to which they refer. Why should the political 
allegiances of that group of flag-wavers be given any more credence than 
Moira Anderson (signatory of an advertisement supporting the constitutional 
Union) or the more reticent Jimmy Shand?

Nor was accomodation with constitutionalism limited to the liberal-left. Such 
inflamation is the everyday ailment of revolutionary groups, in the absence 
of real social movement. When the infection speads to the liberal-left, 
revolutionaries' immune systems even succumb to belief in a "national 
revolution". For example, the articleScot Free  inClass War  sought 
nourishment under the constitutional froth. It too had to be selective about 
what it found."In  Scotland,  the posh Scots of Glasgow and Edinburgh speak 
in strange, strangulated accents and send their kids south to English 
boarding schools"  .True, some aristocratic children are sent to English 
public schools,but the private day schools of Glasgow and Edinburgh are more 
fertile sources of future leaders of the Faculty of Advocates, etc. The 
writer follows the tradition when radicals try to deal with nationalisms, and 
tries to export the ruling class in a way which can render them less Scots 
than the rest of us - a sleight-of-hand always needed when creating the 
illusion of national interest.

In the pre-election New Left Review  (no.191) Robin Blackburn scavenged 
around what were anticipated to be "The Ruins of Westminster". He emerged 
holding aloft the unique failure of the British New Left to institutionalise 
itself, a victim of the terrible British political system. But where, unless 
in a few tenured academics' seminar rooms, can the vibrant and victorious New 
Left be found? Presumably not in France, Germany or Italy. GLC socialism may 
even be one of that New Left's highest actual and possible achievements.

The NLR presented the left-liberal consensus around electoral reform as 
encouraging diversity rather than conformity and hoped that it might provide 
a safe haven for shell-shocked socialists. Isobel Lindsay, the convenor of 
the Scottish Constitutional Convention was allowed to roam freely over the 
space claimed by the Convention. Once again, the list of parties and interest 
groups vouched for the Convention's legitimacy, and Lindsay could rest 
assured that "the project has been a classic example of civil society at 
work".

What is this "civil society"? It is less the formal and informal 
life-experiences of the population than particular interest groups oriented 
around the State. David Marquand admired the Convention's "roots in the 
autonomous institutions of a civil society on the march"  and the Scots 
ability to "fashion a participatory constitution in a participatory manner"  
(in The Guardian, 28/2/92). But "civil society at work" amounted to almost 
nothing. Its crutch was electoral (not through referendum but through party 
consensus) and needed one or two Conservative MPs to lose their marginal 
seats. They didn't, and by the early hours of 10th April, the edifice of the 
Constitutional Convention was crumbling. 

Before the election, suspicion of hyperbole was a matter of belief and 
argument, but a post-mortem is obviously now required. The Convention's 
pretense was to present itself as representing the people of Scotland 
"through their institutions". This was accepted across the spectrum of 
non-Conservative political parties and a stratum of celebrities came to 
believe in such a tele-democracy in which their voices supplied the 
self-understanding. Long-distance radicalism had repeatedly mistaken cadres 
for the general population (such as the vicarious support for the Sandinista 
Stalinists). Now the fatted calf had being prepared for the returning radical 
sons and daughters. A warm light in the window beckoned them home for their 
appointment with history. "A false radicality had scattered us into 
centrifugal spaces; a vital leap will bring us back to reality. Everything 
becomes real and takes on meaning again once this spectre of historical 
unreality, this sudden collapse of time and the real, is conjured away".  
(Baudrillard ,Fatal Strategies,) 

The Convention play had depended on position. Now the positions began to drop 
away. Within weeks, many of the Convention cast were "resting". Out went 
Malcolm Bruce (Scottish Liberal Democrat leader). Out went Charles Gray 
(Strathclyde Regional Council convenor). Labour splinters joined with the SNP 
in Scotland United - once more, the presentation of unity rather than 
diversity.

Several weeks after the election, Lindsay could be found trying to salvage 
something of the failed promise: "Whatever its other faults, the SNP has been 
non-violent, constitutional and non-racist. Like the other opposition parties 
and campaigning groups in Scotland, it has tried to channel the substantial 
frustration which exists here into positive political activity. There was no 
violence in Scotland over the poll tax which was not the case in the south. 
Credit should be given for this commitment to the democratic political 
process despite the unfairness of the system"  (Letter in The Guardian, 
19/5/92)

The article Devolution: The Chance of Unity in the June 1992 issue of Labour 
Research. projects itself on the facade of unity. Lack of unity is portrayed 
as the reason why the 1979 referendum failed. (In so doing, the article 
falsely projects  Conservatives in 1979 as being "firmly against the idea of 
a Scottish Assembly" ).  Clutching at unity as a chance for recovering 
position, the article degenerates into a list of trade unions which have 
endorsed the Convention documents. Optimism then lies with the "strength of 
feeling that... has seen thousands of people on the streets calling for 
self-government and a new political unity for all opposition parties". 

Does all this matter? Does it amount to no more than a frenzy whose passing 
leaves the sufferer wiser? However, the loss of an illusion tends to take the 
form of contempt rather than disenchantment. Failed by their compatriots, the 
patriot tendency may deplore others for finding something better to do than 
join the 5,000 on a Scotland United  march. Like the Convention before it, 
Scotland United survives only as long as its demand is ignored. It is almost 
certain that no constitutional referendum could  produce a definite 
consensus. As long as the demand is not granted, Scotland United may appear 
as a rallying point for particular campaigns, for example against water 
privatisation. But for as long as "the distinctive Scottish experience of 
citizenship" can be written in terms of "the law, the kirk and the 
educational tradition"  (John Forsyth in The Guardian, 7/2/92), 
constitutionalism remains a search for the good side of political 
representation, a number play which fails to add up but succeeds in hiding 
sectional interests.
From Here & Now 13 1992 - No copyright
