Clans must rise and demand a reason to be cheerful

Clan chiefs are generally fortunate that modern Scots draw a veil over the wholesale eviction and forced emigration of Clan members carried out by many of their forefathers. That inconvenient truth stops many Scots from viewing clan history as part of their own cultural heritage. With good reason.

The current popularity of kilt-wearing and family history may encourage some to think interest in Clan membership can be easily revived. It’s also true that many Scots revel in the pageantry of formal Clan gatherings and regard The Clearances as ancient history. And yet, the betrayal of Scots by their own ruling classes is a recent, continuing, wholesale reality.

A centuries-long breach of faith which could conceivably account for the “Scottish effect” – that unexplained factor which leads Scots to die prematurely whatever their class, income or current location in the world, compared to other UK cities with similar deprivation levels.

Genetic differences, diet, health, behaviour, drug abuse, climate, unemployment, poverty and overcrowding have all been explored by researchers. None alone accounts for the Scottish effect. Now researchers at the University of the West of Scotland suggest the “political attack” of Thatcherism could be to blame, observing that neoliberal “shock treatment” administered to Russians after the break-up of the Soviet Union produced a similar sharp drop in male life expectancy.

But did the “shock treatment” start with Margaret Thatcher – or indeed Boris Yeltsin? Is sudden cultural and material change enough to erode longevity and the will to live? Or does such a terrible dynamic require something else? Something that might resemble crushed hope?

In 2004 I produced a programme with the outspoken comedian Frankie Boyle for Radio Scotland’s 25th anniversary. I cast him as the carnaptious Glaswegian Ghost of Christmas Past, appearing in the dreams of a sleeping Jack McConnell to take him back over 25 years of Thatcher, poll tax riots and the eventual re-birth of the Scottish Parliament. I roughed out a script but the final line about the dour nature of the Scots was his own. “We get down because our hopes are so high.”

He was right. Scots have always had high hopes and dashed expectations – both extremes articulated perfectly by Robert Burns. High hopes created and dashed by our ain folk. And that knowledge cuts like a knife. Thanks to the absence of Scottish history robustly taught in schools, Scots may not be able to identify exactly who robbed this country of the social democratic outlook it might have developed.

But we were robbed. By Scottish industrialists who paid so much less than the going rate for highly skilled labour that emigration peaked during boom years. By Scottish landowners who hiked rents and evicted whole communities. By a self-serving Scottish bourgeoisie who maintained city tenements in conditions of such appalling squalor that infant mortality, TB, malnutrition and rickets were still rife after the Second World War.

And by Scotland’s clan chiefs. Some of whom did bankrupt themselves to feed their people during famine years. But none of whom took the final step achieved by revolution or clear-sighted parliaments elsewhere in Northern Europe. None divided up their land so Scots might finally know what it feels like to have a tangible, physical stake in their own country. Lawyers and politicians aided and abetted. The law of primogeniture (inheritance by the eldest son) has meant landed wealth in Scotland can never be broken up “naturally”.

Despite some reform in 1964 and 2004, campaigner Andy Wightman observes “the laws governing inheritance (still) represent one of the last bastions of landed privilege embodied in law.” We needed a social revolution to wipe the slates clean, it never happened. The real question is not why so many Scots feel crushed but why so many continue to set their sights high. Why do Scots still allow ourselves the painful luxury of dreaming about an equal, resourceful, spirited, healthy society? Why torment ourselves with visions of anything other than the hesitant, un-equal, judgemental society we currently inhabit? Do we really think independence will change Scotland so profoundly?

Based on all the evidence, Scots should have stopped expecting radical change from their timid state or self-interested elite long ago. And yet that hope continues – and continues to be dashed. In fact, it is the product of connection – genuine, clan-like bonds forged between neighbours in tenements and tied houses, in war-time and in starving peace, on islands and in high-rise city ghettoes.

Hope arises from the constant re-creation of the real living clan – where mutual dependence allows a tantalising glimpse of a better future. The solidarity created by adversity has left Scots blessed – and cursed – with an un-extinguishable source of hope for a better future. And that hope is breaking our hearts – literally.

Maybe a new generation of Scottish Studies-taught teenagers will be more confident than us. Or just maybe the Clan Chiefs are about to surprise us all. They could issue a joint apology for the betrayal of centuries past and hand their land over to local development trusts.

Clan Donald has made a start, with plans for a new village near the Gaelic College on Skye. Sleat Community Trust backs the project – but once again the Clan not the locals are in the driving seat. That’s just a new refrain of a very worn song. The only thing left for Clan Chiefs to do – other than decorate platforms and entertain Americans – is to return what their forebears took. Trust, land… and good reasons for remaining hopeful.