DOES Jack McConnell make you cringe? Or is the first minister the man with the plan that will help an entire nation stop behaving like a bunch of neurotic curs who have resisted every therapy known to history?
Rhetorical questions: the mark of the deeply insecure, or the sign of the bold and rational? Apparently, there is scope for further interrogation. Last week, at any rate, Scotland’s first minister announced a determination to eradicate our national cringe, replace it with boundless confidence, and unleash our bottomless potential.
Suffice it to say that I am not yet carried away by the prospect.
This is not, I think, because I find confidence hard to come by. Sit still for a picture by-line and you admit, implicitly or explicitly, that you got a double helping of ego somewhere along the line. Jack, as a politician, knows all about that. Yet in delivering the keynote address at the inaugural conference of Globalscot, a scheme to harness the talents of the Scottish diaspora for the sake of the old country, he treated the cringe as self-evident, and as a problem. Neither thesis convinces.
What is it to cringe, after all? To mangle the jargon, it is both to suffer and indulge an inferiority complex. And what is it to say, confidently – now there’s an irony – that the condition afflicts five million-odd souls persistently? Has the Executive run tests? Has a psychometric evaluation been carried out? Or is the cringe a mere political convenience?
The rhetorical questions will cease shortly, I promise. The first thing to say about the first minister’s speech is that I wonder how he knows, with such certainty, that he is entitled to “despair” over Scotland’s “baggage”. Didn’t Colin Montgomerie just all but win the Ryder Cup? Is Andy Murray number one among British tennis players (despite that defeat by Tim Henman)? Does the Westminster Cabinet contain a disproportionate number of Scots? Does Edinburgh host the biggest arts festival in the world? Are we now at the cutting-edge of stem-cell production? Have we produced a few writers and painters recently? And does our history point to under-achievement?
McConnell means well. Not so long ago, he delivered a speech that hoped aloud for a second Scottish Enlightenment. The wish was not half as vainglorious as some of the dullards in his audience believed. When Jack talks about “the best small country in the world”, he means it. My problem is threefold.
First, I don’t see a lot of cringing, actually. If anything, there is a kind of prickly self-confidence in Scotland just at the moment, even if much of our Anglophone media prefers to believe otherwise. Secondly, I’m wary of the mass-diagnosis of entire nations: that way leads to stereotypes, and those are rarely useful. Thirdly, I am not confident that lessons in confidence create nations at ease with themselves and the world. Consider only the recent results of America’s unshakeable self-belief.
If we must generalise, we can say this: traditionally, Scots lean towards scepticism rather than the bland, slightly vacuous, idea of confidence. We could add that the cringe, if it exists, arises from a pair of unexamined ideas. One is that Scots who quit the place – Globalscot’s “160 business leaders from around the world” among them – have somehow liberated themselves from a stifling, moribund domestic scene. To get on, they had to get out. True?
Second, there is the source of the cringe. To whom do we feel inferior, precisely? The good people of Newcastle? The citizens of Birmingham? Dubliners? Parisians? New Yorkers? To accept the notion of the cringe, you must first believe that success can only be measured, always and inescapably, if it happens elsewhere. For those Scots who buy the idea – and God knows there are enough of them – that means London.
The idea is quaint, on several levels. Last week, McConnell blamed “the Scottish media for talking Scotland down”. I take the point. Sit in the press gallery at Holyrood and you will find yourself next to some grizzled hack bemoaning the lack of talent on the benches below. A variation on the theme has it that Scotland’s most able politicians ply their trade at Westminster, not in a wee, pretendy legislature in Edinburgh.
Invariably, though, such commentators have witnessed the Commons at its whipped, soporific worst, and seen its incoherent Victorian practices at first hand. The geniuses who pursue their ambitions in London were the same ones who nodded through that very clever Iraq war, who have shown themselves incapable of restraining a presidential legislature, and who do not, taken as a group, show measurable signs of civilised life. Or would confidence blossom if only Dr John Reid was once again among us?
London is the most astonishingly parochial place I have ever encountered. Lack of interest in the outside world is matched only by sheer, sublime ignorance of what might be going on elsewhere. The deracinated Scots drawn to the Great Wen are the chief purveyors of the idea of a Scottish cringe, but that has as much to do with getting one’s excuses in first as it has to do with the truth. They invent a past to excuse their present.
Good luck to them. Part of what McConnell was trying to say, I believe and hope, was that Scots can go anywhere, be anyone, and do anything yet be spared a debate on who knew their faithers. Good. What I do not believe is that the old phenomenon is a serious problem in modern Scotland. London is a great city, but – how best to put this? – London bores me. Its concerns are narrow. Its first instinct is to retreat into a bubble of self-involvement. And it is – in politics, literature, urban planning, or civic purpose – forever five years out of date. I’m tired of London. I prefer life.
Yet if England’s capital cannot properly explain the cringe that bothers the first minister, what can? Last week, he said, blandly: “I blame the welfare state for a bit of that.” A bit of what? Presumably he means the antique notion, still favoured in the Janus-faced press, of a dependency culture. For people who have never been on the dole, it explains everything. For anyone who has been on the dole, the question is simple: that’s a joke, right?
THE only dependency worth the name in modern Scotland is that to which the prosperous classes cling: the advantage of wealth. Strangely, this constituency is the one that also favours the notion of the cringe. If it emanates from London, it must have value. If it emanates from Scotland and receives a metropolitan imprimatur, it must be valuable but suspect. If it is merely Scottish, for the hell of it, it must – mustn’t it? – be worthless.
That is not the way this country feels at 7pm this evening. Perhaps I don’t get out enough. Perhaps I minimise the difficulties. Jack is nostalgic for sports days and prize-givings which, apparently, “rewarded success” once upon a time. Really? In my day – not recently, I’ll grant – those affairs were a joke. I got my daft awards and never once imagined that they bore any relation to the real world. Nor did I ever think that picking up a prize in London enhanced my self-esteem. Be serious.
Not for the first time, our first minister is the man in the corner of a freshly-painted room, and about to wonder how he can pick his way to the door without leaving a footprint. If he truly despairs of an alleged tendency among Scots, particularly the young, to put themselves and their country down, there is a simple answer. Why not try independence, and see if that might just have a small effect on the stereotypical national psyche?
Why not? It fits the pattern of the McConnell argument precisely. It is, surely, the emotional autonomy to which all those inspirational children of the diaspora featured by Globalscot would have us aspire. It is the piece missing from the jigsaw, and the logical step awaiting a confident society.
Perhaps, on the other hand, the cringe is Jack’s problem. His is the party that tells us, after all, that we are not up to the choice. His is the party that says we are not fit to be left to our own devices. It is still not clear why the first minister can speak with such confidence about a lack of confidence, but there is one certain way to test the proposition.
Feart, Jack?
