Iain Gray: Limited by Scottishness

OUR obsession with the independence referendum and our national identity is holding us back when we should be looking at the bigger picture, writes Iain Gray

This year I achieved a minor ambition, by taking part in the Edinburgh Book Festival. Not, alas, as the novelist I have always harboured a secret hankering to be, but as a session chair.

Given the choice of introducing a Financial Times journalist with yet another book about the financial crisis, or an exciting young Nigerian writer, I plumped for the latter. It was a good choice. Uzodinma Iweala is indeed young, exciting, brilliant and handsome (I am assured).

His first book, a novel, journeyed into the internal darkness of a child soldier brutalised by an unidentified civil war, reaping high praise and many awards. His second is an examination of how Aids affects Nigeria, constructed from his conversations with some of those affected. It becomes, though, a reflection on attitudes to Africa – firstly his own, since he is Nigerian but also a Harvard scholar who has lived all his life in Washington; and then the attitude of the West, especially western liberals.

He is scathing about celebrities who campaign to “save” Africa, and western attitudes which treat Africa as an amorphous mass. His view that China gains respect in Africa through understanding the continent’s complexity and recognising its long-term potential has gained him some notoriety in the United States.

So it was a fascinating session, touching on big themes. The Book Festival was packed with Scotland’s media, and not a few of Scotland’s intellectual elite. However, they were there for Gordon Brown, who was speaking on – what else – the Referendum.

Uzo himself was excited that Gordon was around, and quizzed me about the independence debate. But I felt a little embarrassed that he had come to Scotland to find that we are only really interested in one thing, and that is ourselves. It is ironic too, because Gordon is a politician profoundly interested in global issues, and someone who has thought deeply about our relationship with Africa. Yet had he chosen to lecture on anything except the referendum, he would have been thought daft, and the media would have been nowhere to be found. Scottish independence is a big question, but our obsession with it is making our politics small.

It may not just be politics either. The Book Festival’s Writers’ Conference featured a tremendous debate on “National Literature”. Irvine Welsh introduced the topic, and coverage largely focused on his denunciation of the Man Booker Prize as “highly imperialist-orientated” and anti-Scottish. He might be right, but the meat of the debate was a discussion on whether writers should consciously strive to write “national” literature.

Welsh himself was clear that he did not write novels which deliberately set out to be “Scottish”, but the next generation took a different view. Ewan Morrison argued that Scottish writers should “put up walls” to avoid “homogenisation”, while Alan Bissett introduced himself as “writing for Scotland, with no apology for that”. This is because, he said, “Scotland is a colonialised, marginalised country”.

I would have been fascinated to know what Uzo Iweala thought about the idea that Scotland is “colonised”, never mind “marginalised”. However, it was another Nigerian writer, Ben Okri, who intervened brilliantly at this point.

Recalling similar debates in the 1960s about an “African literature” of “negritude”, Okri quoted Wole Soyinka saying, “a tiger does not debate its tigritude, it just pounces”. Then he made his warning explicit: “The minute you have the idea this shape is ‘Scottishness’ you have limited the possibilities of Scottishness for all time … if you overdefine what is a national literature you will constantly reproduce a cycle of clichés of nationalism.”

The whole debate is on the web, and should be required viewing for Scottish politicians. First, because Irvine Welsh talks powerfully about the “Gramscian struggle for cultural hegemony”. Some of us on the “Better Together” side of the debate realised a while ago that we have comprehensively failed to engage in that struggle, and as a result cultural Scotland is fast becoming a separatist hegemony. It may be too late, but we should fight back.

Secondly, the danger for literature encapsulated by Okri is paralleled by the danger for politics of our obsession with the constitutional question. If we limit the shape of Scottish politics to “Scottishness”, then we diminish it. Of course we talk about the economy, poverty and education all the time. Yet too often we do so solely through the prism of the constitutional debate.

Here is the First Minister launching his legislative programme: “Our unemployment and economic inactivity rates are lower and our employment rate is higher than the UK average … the decline in economic output has been significantly smaller in Scotland than in the rest of the UK.”

Surely the answer to that is “So what?” Our economy is in recession and there are more than 200,000 Scots jobless. Why risk limiting the possibilities of Scottishness to just a little bit better than England? Is that not proclaiming our “Scottishtude” instead of “pouncing” on the problem.

This is not entirely a party political point. I never liked Donald Dewar’s formulation of “Scottish solutions for Scottish problems”. I know what he meant, because it seemed to me to be a self-limiting statement, which holds within it the danger of rejecting solutions because they “were not invented here” or, even more topically, because they demand the pooling of sovereignty or playing a full part in a larger political or economic whole.

Nor is it all politicians’ fault. I cannot count how often journalists have told me that “there is only one story in town”. Scotland on Sunday reported that when George Osborne was in Scotland last week he toured our national newspapers. Not one asked him how global capitalism could be stabilised. They had questions only about the referendum.

At its daftest, it is this symbiotic parochialism in press and politics that leads a first minister to think that it is a good idea to coin a phrase such as “Scolympian”.

Historically, Scotland has been at its best when we do not dwell on our Scottishness, but just get on with it. That is how we have been a beacon of progress in the past. When Voltaire said: “We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation,” it was because Scottish Enlightenment thinkers turned their Scottish education and intellect to which ideas of science, society and philosophy were right and rational, not which ones were the most Scottish.

In a final moment of literary serendipity, I found myself a few days ago in a house near North Berwick, once owned by Robert Louis Stevenson. The owner assured me that Stevenson wrote Treasure Island there, and sure enough there was the study, and the desk, looking out on the small island of Fidra in the Forth. Stevenson may have gazed on Fidra, but his Scottish vision and Scottish imagination saw it Treasure Island-shaped. Looking at Scotland, he saw the world.

I long for the day when Scottish politics is once again something other than referendum-shaped. Then, sighting their legitimate big prey of prosperity, equality and social justice, our political tigers will at last stop discussing their own tigritude, and just pounce.

• Iain Gray is Labour MSP for East Lothian